Contact
by EvilStevilTheKenevil
Summary: Fox McCloud pays the city of Zootopia a visit, but it's the T.A.M.E. collar dystopian version, and the SCP Foundation is involved. Somehow.
1. Omens

Having been born a refugee in the immediate aftermath, she'd never actually set foot there. But she'd heard the stories, and Krystal couldn't help but think of them now as the hoverbus soared narrowly overhead.

_**Somewhere on the planet Cerinia, eons ago...**_

They'd been waging the Second Plino-Kaartesan War for well over a month, yet nothing had changed. here the army sat atop their towers, guarding the city.

Off in the distance, they could be spotted: Something resembling a platoon, all sporting copper helmets with twin metal mohawks and a bare stripe that ran across much of their indigo craniums. Their hands were raised, yet none actually touched the fortification they were hauling. They marched, 60 to each levitating edifice, the stiltmen scouts half running and half flying ahead atop the poles strapped to their legs. Staffs in hand, they leapt towards the towers, buzzing about like angry wasps as they unleashed disproportionately big fireballs from their brazen staffs at the opposing army. All the while, the soldiers had halted, the rectangular group neatly splitting in two and marching apart as their edifice began to lower. The day before yesterday, this field was all but empty. Then, someone, somewhere, had literally seen fit to bring in the army, and the enemy responded in turn. Behind the towers sat a pyramid that was great enough to require 6666 soldiers to move it, its white limestone glimmering in the cold, distant light of The Lesser Sun, which was already being eclipsed by its greater sibling. From the top of this pyramid (which wasn't actually _that_ big, but it was still a sight to see), Bikarypiths, 4th crowned king of the 9th dynasty, sighed, and retreated into its depths. Descending the stairs he came across one of many chambers, the walls here plated in a thin layer of gold.

"Akar?" Said the king, who knew better than to barge in when she was seeing things. It was her job, after all, and she was awfully good at it. In time, Akarypithe the Wise would go on to be remembered as one of the greatest seers of The Second Age, and right now she was serving as council to war-lord Bikarypiths. The greater sun was eating the lesser, and right on cue, the enemy soldiers had arrived.

"_Akar?_" He asked again, needed the advice. Dismayed, he opened the door to a sight that was astounding even by the standards of Cerinian society: The great seer was naked, eyes glowing as she floated 15 centimeters off the floor. Physically, she was here, but in reality, she was neither anywhere nor anywhen close to this planet.

"What do you see?"

"I will never let you rest. I will never let you leave. I will never let you go."

The king hated it when she was like this, and, needing to act on a rather pressing matter, he left. Whatever she was seeing now was well beyond his scope, and he had no business interrupting her like this.

Speaking of which, a phalanx of archers had taken their positions, lying in wait for the king to emerge. Spying him emerging from the pyramid, an enemy commander called out to his men.

"Archers, take aim!"

The king clutched his sword in one hand as he brought the horn to his lips in the other.

"FIRE!"

The arrows sang as the horn bellowed, the battlefield suddenly in an uproar like an unwatched pot of water on stovetop.

* * *

_**EvilStevilTheKenevil presents:**_

_**"CONTACT", **__**A StarFox/SCP/Zootopia crossover**_

* * *

The doctor reclined in a chair, as he often did. He was working on some unimportant report on some trivial thing, one of many that had to be filed after a containment breach of this magnitude. SCP-205-2 momentarily flickering while literally nothing else happened in chamber 52 was infinitely less interesting to him than some of the other CCTV footage that had been captured during the incident. As a Thaumiel class entity, the only reason why SCP-5121 himself wasn't in such a cell was because he'd made himself useful for containing other anomalies, and that report would need to be completed one of these days.

But it could wait. The doctor had been filing reports all day, and whether or not he spent the next minute or so goofing off, he'd be filing reports for days. So, in his boredom, he did exactly that: setting the papers aside, once again dragging the slider back and clicking "play".

A video, shot from a wall mounted camera in a corner of a long concrete hallway, appeared on the screen. A psionics researcher who once had answered to a man who himself had once been called "Mitchell" appeared onscreen from the left, rounding the corner with an armed guard in tow, escorting SCP-5988 to one of Site 19's many safe rooms. Once inside, they'd lock the doors and let the MTF people do their jobs, or at least that was the plan.

In reality, it was over in seconds:

SCP-5562-C engages SCP-5988.

SCP-5562-C attempts to terminate SCP-5988. Attempt failed.

SCP-5988 terminates SCP-5562-C. _Violently_.

Somebody was at the door. SCP-5121 recognized the little boy immediately.

"I've been expecting you."

"Bad. Man."

"Ah, come to see the bad man now, have you not?" SCP-5121 sighed, the smile leaving his face. "They don't like me at first." He'd said to a boardroom. "None of them do. But eventually, they all come around. By then, something terrible has happened. By then, they've been broken. By then, they seek that which is like themselves, and so they come to me." _Why? Why did it have to be so soon?_

He hated being right all the time. Especially now.

"It hurts." SCP-5988 refused to take so much as a step inside his office, so he walked over.

"I know it does. What's wrong?" He said, kneeling down as he reached for the boy's shoulder. He didn't even need to enter, he could feel it from here.

"_It hurts so much._"

"Please, I need you to-" SCP-5988 collapsed, sputtering in what resembled an epileptic fit.

SCP-5121 made for his desk, reaching for the intercom.

"This is doctor-" something grabbed his leg. The boy, his face tranquil, was right behind him.

"What do you do with the mad that you feel?"

"-never mind." the doctor hung up. _Come with me, kid. I've something to show you._

And so the poor kid followed.

* * *

**Meanwhile...**

"It was a birthday party. A. GOD. DAMN. BIRTHDAY. PARTY. _We even had a a cake with real icing._ And what for? Maybe, just maybe, it was because we were naive enough to try and give a little girl a sprinkle's worth of fun in her life, to find something, _anything at all_, to make all these empty, _wasted_ years worth living, because they're not even miserable! Oh boy do I _wish_ I could say they were miserable! But no, you lot didn't even let us keep our sadness, didn't you? It just wasn't FUCKING ENOUGH WASN'T-"

What would likely have been a cathartic rant was cut off by a red light and a buzzing sound.

"And what about the girl? There she was, not even half a meter tall, just having a little fun, at her birthday party." He paused, only for a moment, to take a breath. "But now, instead of actually being able to _enjoy_ the icing on the cake, or anything that even comes close to passing for fun, little Jasmine gets to spend her 7th birthday learning what "orphan" means. And somehow, and here's the _real_ miracle folks, this not only _my_ fault, but I owe _you_ an explanation? You don't know _shit_ about what I've been through. You don't know how many hours of sleep I've lost, how long I've had to work, and sweat, and toil, and _cry_ to even get this dream off the-"

More buzzing, more red.

* * *

The battle had dragged on well into the night. Many had died as Cerinia's twin suns set, and many more would die once they rose again the following morning. But through it all, the king and his legions had kept the city safe.

_For now._

"Sorry, um, about earlier." Akarypithe the Wise was blushing, slightly.

"So strong, it was. From the gods, it must have been. I did not mind it at all." The king, for diplomatic reasons, was lying. He'd done it before, and would do it again countless times, but in his mind it was never outright _deception_, for he was merely omitting a truth as required to remain polite. When you are king (and Bikarypiths certainly was), you must know these things.

"What did you see?" He asked.

"There will be a great warlord, his power quenched in fury. He can only arrive once a great calamity has struck, unlike any known to our people."

"Will this warlord pose a threat to my kingdom?"

Akarypithe burst into laughter.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed "we'll both be _loooooooooong_ dead."

The king sighed.

* * *

**Hello there, dear readers!**

I've had an idea for a _Zootopia/StarFox_ crossover for quite a while now, and eventually they clumped together into something I could turn into a story. As I explored my story, however, I realized two things: My secret underground laboratory, in which much of this fic was to take place, was beginning to look a lot like Site 19, and that the various odds and ends of the SCP foundation were becoming increasingly useful and downright essential for the story to work at all. So, I abandoned a mere handful of subtle references and decided to straight up include the SCP mythos, by name, in all its reality-warping glory.

In other words, this is a three way crossover, hosted on a site that only allows me to tag two of them. FML.

**And now for the disclaimers:**

First: I don't own Star Fox. Or Zootopia. Nobody owns the SCP mythos.

Second: This isn't a WildeHopps story. If you were hoping for_ that_, just stop reading now.

Third: Although I have gone to some effort to ensure that people who aren't passingly familiar with The Foundation and its hijinks can still follow along, I must nevertheless recommend that you read up on this stuff, because it actually is important for the plot (I'd go into more detail, but at that point I'd be spoiling my own story). For those who _aren't_ in the know: You can start by reading the "The Things Dr Bright Is Not Allowed To Do At The Foundation" on the SCP wiki.


	2. Welcome to Site 19

As much as a day in Spring can be said to be normal, what with cherry blossoms, new leaves, and flowers in bloom and all, it was a fairly normal day, a calm sea under a sky perturbed by the whine of a police helicopter, flying like a madman through the buildings as it rabidly pursued the latest unlucky soul to run afoul of the unholy system that ran this city, the sound of the blades sending shivers down the spine of a fox who was rather un-blissfully unaware of his own impending demise.

Whether it be the people, collectively glued to their screens as the latest police chase unfolded on live TV, or the puppets of the system itself, who were all busy all the time brainwashing everyone else, nobody, not even one person realized that there was an intruder in their midst. Perhaps LIGO noticed, not that it mattered: The people, like always, ignored the reality they were seeing and swept any discrepancy under the rug, marching into the machine with screwdrivers and soldering irons in their latest attempt to blind it to the truth.

The intruder itself, an oblong green striped thing that was roughly 1.5 times the size of a bowling ball, fell from the sky with little fanfare, landing with a dull _splunk_ in the water, where it proceeded to bob for the next hour or so, before vanishing.

* * *

An edgy, angular, retro-futuristic car gently came to a halt by a rectangular, minimalistic white booth, its path blocked by a matte grey metal arm that was neither polite nor menacing. Its mirrored driver side window rolled down with a soft whir.

"Dr. Feldman, early as always!" said the guard, as he pressed some buttons at his desk.

"Long time no see, Gerald. Where were you last Friday?" Indeed, the man in the mirrorshades at the booth had _not_ been present last Friday morning, and they'd had to get some other guy to fill his shift.

"My great uncle died recently. The funeral was that afternoon, very last minute." The gate was now rising, as if it were a soldier performing a slow motion salute. At this point, it must be noted that, technically, Security Officer Gerald Calhoon was required to require all personnel to produce an ID to gain access to the facility, and that whether or not his failure to do so would get him fired largely depended on whether or not the inspecting officer in question was having a bad day. However, Dr. Feldman just so happened to be the Senior Administrator of Site 19, all of the _really_ classified stuff was hidden behind several other ID checks, and even if he hadn't been good friends with Officer Gerald since sophomore year of high school, he could've reasonably expected the officer to at least know who he was. Wrongful termination lawsuits and all, not knowing the guy who you worked for wouldn't get you _fired_, but it could certainly jeopardize your prospects of getting a promotion any time soon.

"Well I'm awfully sorry to hear that, sir."

"Oh yeah dude, the guy just _randomly_ dropped dead one night, no warning at all!" If Dr. Feldman had been a recently promoted manager with no friends and 20 different high brass on his ass, he might've taken offense to this lapse in procedure. Alas, none of those things accurately described Feldman, or his predicament, and so, he continued the conversation. Yes: There was in fact some _very serious business_ that went on in the depths of Site 19, but as a long-time veteran of paramilitary bureaucracy, Feldman knew that conducting _very serious business_ 24/7 was enough to make most people lose their minds, so, in the interest of maintaining everyone's sanity, certain necessary concessions were allowed to slide.

"Wow." Feldman was taken aback, a sad look staining his decidedly primate face. "He seemed so-"

The doctor was going to say "healthy" but was instead cut off by a bleating horn and a raspy, tired sounding voice.

"Hey _slowpoke_-" the voice paused for a moment, coughing furiously. "-can we get a move on?"

Officer Gerald Calhoon was a life long friend, and thus, Dr. Feldman tolerated the occasional "dude" from him. This guy, however, was _not_ a friend, and Dr. Feldman found himself incensed to such a degree that he was actually reaching for the lever, intent on opening the door, getting out of the car, and chewing out whoever in the minimum wage, chain-smoking, janitorial _hell_ it was that had just usurped the interpersonal decency of Site 19. Indeed, he did exactly this, getting as far as the bumper of his car before he was quite rudely surprised, for it was none other than _the_ Fox McCloud in the driver's seat of the other car.

For reasons that will be discussed later, the greymuzzled vulpine had paid this facility more than a few visits over the years, and he was at the very least a familiar acquaintance with most of the Cornerian high brass, including Dr. Feldman. Not to mention the fact that he was a world recognized war hero, or whatever. Dr. Feldman, meanwhile, was in such a position that unless General Hare or President Cuthbert were present on base, he was _the_ supreme authority here (and even then, both the general and the president would probably defer to his judgement). Sure, Fox McCloud had been on a first name basis with former General Pepper during the Lylatt Wars, and the current General was himself a Star Fox expy. (Hell, if the rumors were true, he may have even 'dated' Yaru de Pon's daughter back in the day!) Still, there were things here that were well beyond his security clearance, secrets that had been kept even from _the_ great Fox McCloud, things that Dr. Feldman _did_ know.

Secrets that he would kill Fox to protect, if necessary.

Both men had been expecting to get into a pissing contest against some no-name no-body, and they recognized each other's status immediately. They stared awkwardly at each other for the next few seconds, like that one time Fox had bumped into Wolf O'Donnel at the preschool drop off.

"Oh-"

"Uh-"

"Er-"

"S-Sorry, um-"

"Tell you what" Said the now thoroughly embarrassed Fox, his head protruding slightly from the window. "Let's just pretend this never happened, OK?"

"That would be most advisable. I'll see you later, Calhoon!" He said, turning back to his car as Fox McCloud rolled up his driver side window.

Dr. Feldman, who had decided not to bother with re-buckling the seatbelt, climbed back into his car. He shut the door, reached for the INTERRUPT switch, thought better of it and put the belt on anyway, and then toggled the switch back to the off position. The edgy silver thing that was his car then proceeded into the idyllic white parking garage with a soft hum, gently making a right and ascending up a ramp to the 2nd deck. There, it swerved to the left, neatly slotting into the rectangular space in a manner more befitting of extensively choreographed docking maneuver in orbit than of a vehicle in a parking lot. When he'd first set foot here as an intern in his senior year, parking lots had never been this tidy, and any hotshot driver capable of parking his car in such a way would've attracted a considerable crowd. Now, however, Andrew Feldman had been promoted to Senior Researcher at Cornerian Anomalous Materials Research Facility Site #19, cars drove themselves, and parking lots were invariably tidy. The vehicle itself really was quite ironic: A 20th century icon of automotive design, powered by what was essentially 19th century reciprocating engine technology, and retrofitted with a state of the art level 4 autopilot system.

The gull wing opened with a subdued hiss, as if it were a spaceship, prompting Andrew Feldman to first put down his book, then rise from the orange bucket seat, and finally emerge from his DeLorean Motor Company DMC-19. Fox McCloud, meanwhile, was one of the few people who still drove his own vehicle, and had parked his inconspicuous minivan on the third floor, a bumper sticker reading "my other car is the landmaster" being the only clue to the identity of its owner.

Meanwhile, somewhere deep underground, a little fox boy giggled.

His name was Marcus, and he'd seen something funny.

Only, he hadn't actually seen it, and he wasn't the one laughing, yet he was amused all the same. The couch upon which he rested, having been sealed away in one of the many rec rooms of Site 19, had therefore evaded the ionizing photons responsible for radiation induced photochemical degradation. Having never confronted the sun nor its rays, its scarlet upholstery was still just as bright as it had when it left the factory in the year [DATA EXPUNGED]. The tape, however, which had been viewed countless times over the years, had not been so lucky, and was beginning to wear thin in places. Not that the little cerulean fox cared. Although he perceived and reacted to the gag onscreen, he wasn't actually _watching_ it at all, for the regions of his brain that concerned themselves with the interpretation of ocular input had been dormant until moments ago.

Marcus McCloud had been born blind, and although feeding the raw output of someone else's optic nerves into his own brain wrought forth immense joy, such an activity was still considerably exhausting for the up and coming telepath. Meanwhile, receiving the conceptual, abstractified, and heavily processed data that someone else's brain outputted was considerably easier upon his own, and as he had had a long day today, Marcus had found himself doing precisely this, literally reading the contents of his chaperone's mind as if it were text on a page. Although he was wide awake, his own emotional perturbances prompting Jordan to chuckle at the sight of Thomas the Tank Engine mistakenly ramming into and subsequently getting stuck in a pile of snow, you could easily mistake him for being fast asleep, especially since nap time was only 30 minutes away. Considering how hard it was for him to see with his own visual cortex through someone else's eyes (a feat necessary to truly appreciate a good sight gag), he'd likely fall asleep well before that.

Marcus McCloud had also been diagnosed with autism that, while not being severe enough to count as downright mental retardation, was in no way mild enough to make independence likely. In other words, if you were trying to guess if he'd ever go on to live by himself, a coin flip would've been just as accurate a prediction as any one of the many tests they'd conducted over the years. The fact that Marcus McCloud was also a full blown savant certainly complicated matters, as did the fact that he was one of the most abnormally gifted telepaths known to Cornerian science, even as a 4 year old who'd only recently graduated from diapers.

Paradoxically, this blind and seemingly dumb toddler could often be spotted wandering the many halls of Site 19, often with Dr. Jordan Ridgeford in tow. He'd already been to see many doctors for the autism, and just as many researchers had come to see him once he began stacking crayons end to end, bending spoons, opening portals to [REDACTED] at the dinner table, screwing with compass needles from a distance, or other spooky eldritch shit like that. This last one in particular attracted considerable interest from the scientists, who saw immense potential for weaponization. And, as this base was (partly) run by the Cornerian Army, such prospects were always on the back of their minds, a fact which did not exactly bring comfort to either of his parents. However, as the research facility had pediatric therapists, thaumiel class anomalous objects to assist in containment, scientists and technicolor test tubes up the wazoo, endless creepy concrete hallways with flickering, buzzing lights, and multiple highly trained mobile task forces on their payroll, it was an almost perfect place to grow up for the little misunderstood autistic boy with scary mind powers. Combined with the fact that the boy's father was on a first name basis with many high ranking personnel in the Cornerian armed forces, and his desire to keep his son away from the paparazzi, it was no wonder that Marcus McCloud had spent half of his life down here, and was already learning to navigate the facility.

But as of right now, he and Dr. Ridgeford were giggling at the misfortunes of a sentient, cherubic piece of 19th century technology.

"Oh," Gordon the steam locomotive hissed, as he plunged into the ditch onscreen. "get me out! Get me oooouuuut!"

Speaking of surprisingly old technology, Fox McCloud and Dr. Feldman were now descending into the depths of Site 19 in an elevator that was almost old enough to be Fox's grandfather.

"You feeling alright?"

"No, actually." Said Fox, his voice sounding as if he had vocal chords made of gravel, "I've had _the worst_ cold for the-"

Fox McCloud interrupted himself with a fit of coughing.

"Gee, I'm sorry to hear that."

"And how've you been doing?"

"As good as I can. Progress has been slow, but we're finally ready to test."

"Is that why you called?"

"Oh, right. As a matter of fact, we _do_ have something to show you. And for once it isn't about your son, as interesting as he makes life for us down here."

"_Interesting?_"

"Well what else would you call it? He's one of the only documented cases of early childhood psychic ability in our records!"

Contrary to popular belief, telepathic powers were _not_ the sovereign domain of emotionally unstable children who've lost their innocence too soon at the hands of mad scientists or abusive parents. In reality, the overwhelming layers of meta-abstraction upon which psychic powers of any sort relied, combined with the egocentrism of the prepubescent mind, conspired to make anything more than painting a breath picture at a distance all but impossible for anybody under the age of 11. Indeed, be it ancient Cerinia or modern Corneria, the odds of telepathic powers appearing before puberty, and the organs of rational thought and irrational desire that came with it, were literally one in a million. Thus, while there were enough psychic children out there such that one could actually write a textbook on the subject, rather than one or two case studies, any given civilian was extraordinarily unlikely to have ever met one in person.

"...Fine then. _Interesting_. Now what was it you wanted me to see?"

"I'd rather wait for the briefing to discuss that matter, but the short version is that we might have a mission for you."

A lizard man in a labcoat was standing before them. "Uh, you guys do know the door's open, right?"

And so they stepped out of the elevator.

* * *

Some time later, back in the little white booth, Security Officer Gerald Calhoon was eating a sandwich when off in the distance he heard quite the ruckus. It sounded as if someone tried playing "Dixie" on a car horn, a la the Dukes of Hazzard, and shortly thereafter a cloud of black smoke appeared on the horizon. An old fashioned school bus came skidding 'round a corner, its left tires coming off the ground as it very nearly rolled over in the turn with a painfully audible _squeal!_ Flopping back onto its wheels, it belched an unholy blast of neon green flame from its twin vertical exhaust pipes as it pulled a wheelie and charged for the facility parking lot. Oh, did I mention the bus had been on fire this whole time, looking more like an escaped hellhound than a passenger vehicle?

Security officer Calhoon placed a pair of foam cones into his ears, and pressed a big, specially marked red button. This caused a wall just behind the entrance of the parking garage to retract and swing away, revealing a long, downhill tunnel that lead into a specially constructed bomb-proof bunker.

"Dr. Gerald, good to see you!" He said as SCP-666j flew past in what had once been an ordinary school bus at +100 km/h, black death metal music basting from the windows at ~91 decibels. The diesel's roar echoed off the 1.4 meter thick concrete walls as the bus descended into the depths of the facility, the engine somehow drowning out the music. Officer Calhoon knew better than to close the bunker door.

The ground shook, as a tsunami of orange flames emerged from the gaping maw of the tunnel as if it were a solid rocket booster. The flames died down, followed several seconds later by a single burning tire that lazily rolled out of the garage, under the bar, and past the security booth.

"Good ol' Dr. Gerald, right on time as always." He said, removing the earplugs and closing the bunker door.

* * *

NOTE: Some of you may have noticed that chapter 2 released very shortly after chapter 1. I figured it was worth doing, since there was very little to go off of in chapter 1. But now that I've posted something more substantial, I'll probably be updating this story on something more like a weekly basis. The story's _mostly _complete, but there are a handful of parts I've yet to write, and I'd like to give myself some time to finish them up before I run out of content, and have to go on haitus.


	3. SCP-5562-B

Wow, chapter 3 already! Compared to my other works, it feels _really_ weird posting chapters this short. I mean, chapter 20 of _A Rather Wonderous Journey_ was a 19K word monster that ended up being released as a two-parter! Also, I was literally working on that one for 6 months, and meanwhile I sat down and started writing this one less than 48 hours ago. _Weird indeed_.

Like a lot of SCP stuff, the lore/story here is all between the lines. Speaking of which, I'm thinking I might need to edit the tags for this fic. It's a crossover between 3 franchises, hosted on a site that only allows you to tag two of them, so any combination I choose will leave something out. What do you think, dear reader?

* * *

Item #: SCP-5562

Object Class: Euclid

Special Containment Procedures:

Owing to the nature of SCP-5562 and SCP-5562-A, proper containment is impossible.

A containment chamber with standard rebar reinforced concrete walls no less than thirty 30 centimeters thick is to be constructed such that it encapsulates SCP-5562-B. The chamber is to be furnished with soundproofing sufficient to prevent any high magnitude sonic emission (see below) released from SCP-5562-B from registering above 30 decibels outside the chamber. Class 3H radiation shielding must also be present. The chamber may be enlarged to whatever extent necessary to accommodate testing equipment. No way is known to move SCP-5562-B. No way is known to close SCP-5562-B. SCP-5562-B is growing, and is estimated to cause an XK-class scenario in approximately 68 years.

Owing to the nature of SCP-5562-B, indefinite containment in the strictest sense is impossible. Specifically, SCP-5562 has been expanding since its discovery, requiring its chamber to be expanded on multiple occasions. Owing to its detrimental effect on nearby objects (see below), testing equipment cannot be allowed to remain within 80 centimeters of SCP-5562-B's surface for prolonged periods. In the event that the surface of SCP-5562 comes within 5 meters of the chamber wall, the chamber is to be enlarged as necessary. At the current rate of expansion, the chamber will need to be enlarged in ~27 years.

Measurements of SCP-5562-B's radius and mass are to be taken on a weekly basis. The chamber is to be inspected and cleaned daily, any and all ███████ which accumulates in the chamber is to be removed and disposed of as stipulated in procedure Taradjek-gamma-5. Cameras and lights are to be installed in the chamber in order to provide constant video surveillance of the entire surface of SCP-5562-B. Owing to its nature as a gateway, a team of no less than 3 armed guards are to be monitoring the chamber at any time. The guards are to be stationed no less than 5 meters away from the surface of SCP-5562-B. Should anything hostile emerge from SCP-5562-B, it is to be terminated immediately.

All experiments involving SCP-5562 must be approved by O5 command.

**Under no circumstances is SCP-682 to come within 10 kilometers of SCP-5562.**

* * *

Description:

SCP-5562 has been determined to be pocket of expanding space-time entirely disjoint with our own. Owing to its sheer size and its expansion, containment is not even possible in theory. Although observations taken in and around SCP-5562-A are inconsistent with predicted behaviors of traversable Einstein-Rosen bridges, SCP-5562-A is in many respects similar to █████████ ████, particularly in its weight of approximately -5███████ kilograms. SCP-5562-A is first known to have intersected our bulk on ██/█/200█, when an instance of SCP-5562-B was discovered deep within the basement of site ██. Approximately 3 days prior to its discovery, researcher ████████ allowed a sample of SCP-447 to contact the body of D-████. Site 19 lost all electrical power moments later, triggering one of the worst containment breaches since ████ ████████. During the ensuing cleanup, SCP-5562-B was first encountered in a hall by MTF-31, subsequent investigation revealed that SCP-5562-B appeared in all security footage captured in the aforementioned hall after 447 was spilled.

SCP-5562-B is the intersection of SCP-5562-A and our space-time. All footage recovered from within SCP-5562-A reveals a white-hot void punctuated by two mirror smooth spheres which bear the appearance of obsidian while within the SCP-5562-A. When viewed from without, both apertures appear as roughly spherical objects, their surfaces perturbed by waves of seemingly random direction, origin, and distribution. The surface viewed from without appears perfectly smooth, reflecting +96% of light that hits it as if it were a mirror, rather than a warped view of SCP-5562 itself that would be suggested by the laws of General Relativity.

SCP-5562-B appears to have a detrimental effect on all nearby objects. All objects exposed have been observed to crumble to a dull pinkish dust of unknown chemical composition at a rate dependent on proximity to SCP-5562-B. Note that, as shown when probe 8 stayed in SCP-5562 for a period of several days before returning to our own reality, this effect is confined to SCP-5562-A, and not to SCP-5562. The dust is entirely inert, and Foundation testing has yet to induce it to react with any chemical substance. The dust furthermore does not function as if it were a life form, and only "spreads" when the object itself is near SCP-5562-B.

SCP-5562-B has been observed to emit mildly cognitohazardous sounds and dangerous levels of ionizing radiation in short, infrequent bursts. All personnel assigned to monitor SCP-5562-B should take the necessary precautions.

* * *

ADDENDUM 1. AUTHOR: SENIOR RESEARCHER FELDMAN. Yes, the pinhole was discovered first, but we have decided to classify it as a daughter object of sector _i_. All references to sector _i_ as the daughter object, or to the pinhole as the parent, are to be amended ASAP.

ADDENDUM 2. AUTHOR: DR. CLEF: Turns things to dust, eh? Let's use it on 682!

ADDENDUM 3. AUTHOR: DR. ████████. That last termination attempt can only be described as an unmitigated disaster. I believe this to be evidence of a connection to The S██████ ████.

ADDENDUM 4. AUTHOR: DR. BRIGHT. Holy shit, you're alive?!

ADDENDUM 5. AUTHOR: O5-2. Dr. Bright is not cleared to know the current status of Dr. Kondraki.

ADDENDUM 5. AUTHOR: SENIOR RESEARCHER FELDMAN. Come on guys, I thought we were better than this. Believe me, I don't want _it_ in our reality any more than you lot, but mistakes happen, OK? What's done is done, and lynching ████████ isn't going to make you-know-who go away. The researcher in question has been relocated, and the next idiot who tries to kill him is going to receive a mind wipe and a one-way ticket to D-class!

ADDENDUM 6. AUTHOR: O5-12. Dr. Feldman seems to have been under the influence of SCP-████. Consider his warnings nullified.

ADDENDUM 7. AUTHOR: SENIOR RESEARCHER FELDMAN. _No I was not_ and I've got the psionic screenings to prove it. Stop trying to doxx Dr. ████████.


	4. So, what am I here for?

Much like the red couch in the rec room, the beige cushions of the swiveling chairs here had never seen the light of day in their non-lives, and were therefore almost as pristine now as they had been back in the 80's, minus a slight polish obtained from +20 years of bigwig asses seating themselves upon the chairs, and a red stain that Fox noticed as he scooted his chair in towards the table, perturbing his partaking in the otherwise supremely comfortable bureaucratic throne.

"Uh-" He said, pointing to something below the table like a CEO demanding a blowjob, with a face that suggested his intentions were nothing of the sort. "There's kind of a, um..."

"Oh" replied Senior Researcher Andrew Feldman. "He got the bloody chair. _Ha ha._"

"_The what?!_" Fox, who'd first come here at the request of Foundation personnel after a routine visit to the doctor with Marcus had turned into something out of a Stephen King novel, had heard stories of Site 19 long before he'd ever set foot in this place, and as far as he knew, someone might have actually _died_ in his chair.

"Oh that's just a silly in-joke of ours." Feldman explained. "Actual hemoglobin would've would've turned brown by now."

"In English, please?"

"That's not blood. It's ketchup."

"Oh." Ketchup or otherwise, the sight of a red stain right below Fox's crotch was hardly comforting. "I swear, Dr. Feldman, you people have the _weirdest_ jokes."

"Oh please, that's got _nothing_ on 1543-J."

Several of the bureaucrats chuckled in response.

"Hey-" one of them said "-did you hear about the time my in laws snuck into 914's chamber? They say that was the day 682 was discovered!"

Dr Feldman audibly wheezed, pounding his fist on the table in laughter. Refusing to be outdone, he responded with yet another joke: "Hey, so this one time, 096 walks into a bar, and the bartender says, 'why the long face?'"

More chuckling.

"And 096 says "My alcoholism is destroying my family."!"

The whole room (except Fox) burst into laughter.

"Hey guys...guys?...HEY?!"

Suddenly the room was quiet. Whether or not he'd been "retired" for years, Fox still considered himself team leader, and once in a while it showed.

"Look, are you going to show me something, or should I just leave?" Fox, who usually didn't get up at 0800 hours on a Saturday, was understandably frustrated.

"Oh alright, _fine_. God help us if this guy ever gets his hands on _fives._" Said Dr. Feldman, who neglected to add _"Because one of you is bad enough!"_ to his remark. He was, of course, referring to the chibinator: an anomalous object that when [REDACTED] would produce a miniature, caricatured [DATA EXPUNGED] of whoever it was that had [INSUFFICIENT SECURITY CLEARANCE]. After experiment 6B2-cc had ended in what could only be called _recursive_ disaster, they had decided to seal it away, never to be used again, lest some _idiot_ try to use a copy of that damn lizard to terminate the original. Again.

Strange sense of humor indeed.

"Now, Dr. Byron, would you care to explain why he's here?"

The aforementioned Dr. Byron, a dull brown avian in her early 50's, opened a laptop and reached for a remote. A ceiling mounted projector clicked as the lights began to dim. Having plugged the relevant cable into her laptop's VGA port, she got up and walked to the other end of the elongated briefing room, where a blue screen was beginning to appear atop a whiteboard covered with drawings of every sort of occult symbol imaginable. The projector, recognizing the input source, switched to an image of two flat phong shaded planes, connected by a sort of tubular distortion, as Dr. Byron erased the whiteboard. Gripping a pointer in her left hand, she turned to face the rest of the room.

"Mr. McCloud, are you aware of the concept of parallel universes?"

"What, like alternate dimensions?"

"No, Mr. McCloud, _literal_ parallel universes."

"...Sort of. You step through a portal and you're on a different planet, right?"

Dr. Byron sighed. "Well it's not your fault that most so-called 'science fiction' gets it wrong. At least you've heard the words. Conceptually, the multiverse is actually far older than you'd think, although I must admit this _is_ more of Dr. Imahara's specialty-"

She gestured to a husky in a suit, who grunted in acknowledgement. Aside from McCloud, who himself had dropped out of the Academy to go fight a war when he was 18 years old, Dr. Imahara was the _only_ non STEM major in the entire room, and so long as the postmodernist bookworm managed to somehow find himself in charge of the "real scientists", they'd never let him hear the end of it.

"If I recall correctly-" Dr. Byron continued. "-it first appeared in the literature all the way back in _1666_, although, like most depictions of the multiverse, it gets many key details wrong. For one," she said, gesturing to the distorted tube connecting the two planes in the picture "-there's nothing special whatsoever about The North Pole that would make a portal to another world any more likely to appear there than anywhere else, and let's face it: The existence of multiple earths doesn't make something like a world inhabited by talking animals any less absurd, even if there are infinitely many of them. You might as well say that the cardinality of the naturals and the reals are both aleph-null."

This last statement flew over Fox McCloud's head, ironically soaring right between his all-too-canine ears like a football through the goalposts as it did so.

"Hell-" said Dr. Feldman "-it's literally the same fallacy at work, and it's probably- No, it's _exactly_ as wrong as that last statement."

"Um, _what?_" Fox was utterly clueless on these matters. Come to think of it, that's why he was here in the first place.

Dr. Imahara took a deep breath. "There exists a permutation that is not indexed within any countably infinite set of universes. I'm a goddamn english/theater arts double major and even _I_ know that."

"Wait, I think you've got the quantifiers backwards." Feldman remarked.

"Whatever. Doesn't matter." Dr. Imahara, who was familiar with the underlying concepts, didn't really care one way or the other if what he said was true at face value, because literally everyone in the room know what he meant. Well, everyone except Fox, anyway. Dr. Byron, meanwhile, was flabbergasted at his disregard for the niceties of precise mathematical reasoning.

"_**Are you crazy?!**_ Of course it matters! 'No multiverse contains permutation X' is _trivially_ wrong."

Dr Imahara paused for a moment to contemplate. "Yeah actually, you're right. What I _meant_ to say was that for any countably infinite set of permutations, a permutation exists which is not indexed within that set."

"Um-" Fox was still confused.

"Basically, Mr. McCloud-" Said Dr Byron. "-you're not going to find Zaphod Beeblebrox, no matter how far you look."

"Well, _not quite._" Now it was Dr. Imahara's turn to correct somebody. "Technically, you _might_ not find Zaphod Beeblebrox, because he does not necessarily exist in our multiverse."

"I still don't get it." Fox's relatively virgin mind had yet to even touch calculus with a 10 meter pole, let alone whatever the hell kind of set theory derivative it was that they were talking about.

Dr. Feldman reached into one of his many pockets, retrieving a brass colored coin with a square hole punched in the center, the coin's once mirrorlike finish having been tarnished by a half century of circulation. "Well look, suppose I flip this coin, and it comes up...heads. Meanwhile, an alternate version of me in a parallel universe flipped the coin, and in his permutation, it came up tails. That's all 'permutation' means, it's just the same stuff in multiple places playing out in multiple ways. Now what they've been _trying_ to explain is that murphy's law doesn't really apply here. Just because something _can_ happen, doesn't mean that it _must_ happen, even if the multiverse is infinite."

"Um, shouldn't it be exactly the opposite?"

"No, actually. Just because the digits of Pi are infinite and non-repeating doesn't mean it _must _contain all sequences of numbers, finite or otherwise. For example, the digits of 0.11000111100000..., etc. are also infinite and non repeating, yet you will never even encounter a 2, let alone 55378008. Similarly, I can index universe number **_N_** such that the universe in question contains **_N_** exact duplicates of my coin, but is otherwise a duplicate of this one. I can then index universes 0 through infinity. An infinite number of worlds, yet there is no timeline in which we're not sitting here, in this basement, talking right now. The formal proof is far more complicated, but essentially, the _potential_ permutations are analogous to the real numbers, while the _extant_ permutations map to the integers."

"What's so special about 5537808?" Fox may never have composed even a single proper mathematical proof in his life, but he _did_ happen to have 99th percentile working memory proficiency.

"Fifty-five million, three-hundred and seventy-eight thousand and eight." Dr Feldman slid an index card with the digits scribbled onto it across the table. "When you get home, type that into a calculator and flip it upside down. You'll thank me later."

"You know what, never mind." Fox turned back to Dr. Byron, who was _still_ standing by the whiteboard. "What were you saying?"

"Look, the point is that up until fairly recently, the multiverse was theoretical at best." As she said this, the wormhole diagram was replaced with white specks on a black background: It was a sky full of stars.

Fox McCloud was no theoretical physicist, but he could sure as hell read between the lines.

"But that's changed, hasn't it?"

"Quite so. One of the many details that old story mentioned was that the stars were all different in the alternate universe. Despite how wrong the other ones were, this "prediction", if you wish to call it that, was right on the money. Quite impressive for 350 years ago, actually. Now, what you're looking at here is the first bit of data we retrieved from what we are calling Sector _i_."

Dr. Gears, who had among other things, a Ph.D in computer science, cringed at Dr. Byron's misuse of the word "bit", although it offended him far less than that one time he had encountered a publication that had been subtitled "bits and bytes". Having expected something resembling transhumanist science fiction, Dr. Gear's disappointment at finding out that "bits and bytes" was really a perfectly ordinary slice of life anthology was so extreme that the floating point value stored at the relevant memory location had overflowed to _NaN_.

"Sector _I?_" McCloud asked?

"It's not nearly as arbitrary as it sounds. As I said earlier, parallel universes are _literally_ parallel. You said you were aware of the _concept_ of the multiverse, right?"

"Oh yeah, they do alternate dimensions all the time on _Dr. Who._"

"You watch _Dr. Who?_"

"Not really. Krystal does, however, and she won't stop talking about it." Fox shrugged. "I've seen a few episodes, and it's confusing as all Hell."

"Well tell me, have you ever stopped to ask _where_ exactly the alternate universe is?" Dr. Byron cringed at the words. There were evidently far more than two universes out there, and the idea of the one and only 'alternate' reality being exactly like our own but with _only_ a handful of arbitrary differences was patently absurd _at best_ (what with chaos theory and all). Still, she forced herself to say it all the same.

"Come to think of it, I haven't."

"Well there's no answer, in any case. It's not here, here, here, or even _here_." She said, randomly pointing around the room as she said the words. "You can't find it on a map, you can't point to it in our sky, the way you can a star. Even with an FTL ship, you can never go there, because there is no _there_ for you to go to. The alternate world isn't in our reality, it's not in our 4 dimensions of space and time. So _where_ is it?" She clicked a button on the remote, bringing back the diagram of the 3-dimensional tunnel connecting the two planes, which she was finally able to explain properly.

"The world parallel to our own is hiding in a higher dimension of space, exactly how the flat pages of a book are stacked atop each other in the 3rd dimension. Specifically, the parallel universe is stacked atop our own in the 5th dimension, and, just like the pages in a book, the spaces of our universes run parallel to each other, kept apart possibly by as little as one _micron_ of 5th dimensional distance. You and I are both standing _right next_ to the parallel world, yet as close as it is, we cannot reach it."

Dr. Byron pointed to the tube thing in the diagram.

"In order to get there, you have to create a tube, a tunnel. Or, in other words, a wormhole. In this illustration, the wormhole is a 3-dimensional object, clipping through two flat planes. Thus, to a being in the plane, the wormhole aperture appears circular. Of course, everything's been dimensionally compressed to make it easier to depict. In reality, the planes are 3-dimensional spaces, and thus-" she said, clicking past several slides to an image of what appeared to be a highly polished silver ball floating in an otherwise empty, grey room, the lights and personnel reflecting off of its mirrored surface like an MC Escher drawing. "-to us, it appears _spherical_."

"Are you saying...?"

"Yes."

"_That's_ the wormhole?"

"No, Mr. McCloud. _That_ is but the tiny part of the wormhole that intersects our own spacetime, an aperture, of sorts. The real wormhole is a 5th dimensional entity, and another part of it, of course, intersects the other universe. Just as the square root of negative one expands the 1-dimensional number line into the 2-dimensional complex plane, itself composed of many parallel lines, so too has this discovery radically expanded the scope of our own cosmos, which we now know to be composed of many parallel spacetimes. Thus, we call the parallel universe Sector _i_. That's a lowercase "_i"_, by the way."

"So, you brought me here to show me a picture of a...wormhole?"

This time, it was Dr. Feldman who spoke. "No. We brought you here because we'd like to send you through it."

"_Are you crazy?_" Fox could hardly believe what he had just heard.

"Actually, you're one of the most qualified individuals we've got." Dr. Feldman tossed a _very_ thick manilla folder onto the table.

"First and foremost, you are an experienced pilot, and good under pressure. You also have connections with much of the Cornerian big wigs, and you've had lots of experience with keeping stuff like this under wraps."

"Which is why you couldn't tell me this by email?"

"Correct. The records also indicate that you're fairly experienced with in-universe teleports. Need I remind you of the warp zone you found in Sector X, or that pocket dimension with the cosmic slot machine you entered during a mission in the asteroid fields?"

"I suppose you make a good point."

"Furthermore, we think you might encounter some people over there, and you're one of the few Cornerians to also have had prior experience with making first contact, as you did on Sauria. And since Krystal wasn't from from that planet to begin with, you technically made first contact _twice_ during The Sauria Incident. And don't even get me _started_ on your deployment in The Atlas System. You might very well be the most well traveled man we've got."

"And compared to you egg heads, I'm also probably the most expendable man in the room."

The scientists were stunned into silence. It was like Fox had read Dr. Feldman's mind!

"Don't try to bullshit me Feldman. Death is no stranger to mercenary work, and this ain't the first calculated risk I've taken. Any of you fellas ever taken a casual flight through the lower photosphere of Solar?"

"...Well...um..._shit_."

"Alright, look: What do we know, what are the risks, and what's in it for me?"

"You're accepting the mission?"

"No." He said, unable to pry his eyes from the picture of the wormhole aperture. "But I'm _very_ interested."

Dr Feldman paused to think. "Alright, Dr. Byron. Tell him _everything_."

The avian clicked her remote, bringing back the white specks in the black void. "This was the discovery that changed everything. The photo you are looking at was taken approximately 2 years ago. Now, this was by no means our first attempt to send something over, or even to bring it back."

The stars in a dark sky were replaced by what looked like some sort of space probe and a pile of charred debris lying on a white table in a clean room.

"It was, however, the first time one of our probes managed to return uncorrupted data from Sector _i_."

Once again, stars in a sky appeared on the whiteboard, only this time the foreground was dominated by a large, yellowish white dot, with two orthogonal pairs of lens flares emanating from it.

"Now, at first we had our suspicions, but we could not conclusively rule out the possibility that the wormhole had merely teleported the probe very, very far away. The stars looked quite unfamiliar, but this would've been so in either case. This, however, was one of the nails in the coffin. What you are seeing is the star Betelgeuse. It is Approximately 430 light years away from us, and it bears a very distinctive reddish emission spectra. In other words, owing to the wavelengths of light absorbed by heavier elements, and their varying concentrations within a star, the exact spectra of light emitted by one is somewhat unique."

As Dr. Byron said this, a rectangular horizontal swatch of rainbow appeared towards the bottom of the image, the otherwise smooth gradient punctuated by more than a handful of vertical black lines of varying thicknesses.

"After sending several more probes, we managed to get back a survey of most the sky in Sector _i_, and in that survey, we spotted a very familiar looking star."

The picture shrank, and a second one appeared beside it, depicting the same yellowish disk, with the same punctuated rainbow beneath it. This second photo, however, was quite grainy, and noticeably fuzzier. Many of the dimmer stars in the first picture were not visible in the second one, as if it were shot by a much smaller telescope. Meanwhile, the dozens of brighter stars that could be seen had all been rearranged and scrambled throughout the image, as if it were an entirely different part of the cosmos upon which they now gazed.

"The large, yellow looking star in both images is Betelgeuse. To the extent that we are able to measure them, they have the same surface temperature, the same mass, both are roughly the same distance from the telescope, and therefore present the same apparent brightness, and most importantly, both objects posses the same emission spectra. The image on the left was taken from a Cornerian observatory, while the image on the right came from a probe retrieved from Sector _i_. We managed to match a handful of other stars like this, but that's it: Sector _i_ is otherwise populated by entirely different stars in completely different positions. If it's in our space, then it cannot be anywhere near Corneria."

The stars in the skies were replaced by a fuzzy off-white oval.

"As further evidence, consider this photograph. The object depicted here has been determined to be a considerably blueshifted spiral galaxy, roughly the size of our own, and Sector _i_ has this galactic neighbor barreling towards it, and appears to be situated within a relatively crowded pocket of galaxies. Of those other galaxies, this object, which we've dubbed M31, is by far the biggest. In approximately 5 billion years time, the two will collide, and will probably form a very large and irregular elliptical galaxy when all is said and done. Our galaxy, meanwhile, is alone in the cosmic neighborhood (except for a few satellite globular clusters, anyway). In other words, here is a very large and massive object that is nowhere to be seen in our own sky, yet it exists all the same in Sector _i_. Although this _does_ prove that Sector _i_ cannot be within 8 million light years of Corneria, even this observation does not prove that Sector _i_ is in a different universe. For that, you'd have to photograph the cosmos itself."

What some beings called the Andromeda Galaxy was replaced by two oblong, multi-colored, marbled-looking neon blobs.

"This, of course, is exactly what we did next. The image on the right is a representation of the cosmic microwave background radiation as seen from Sector _i_. Keep in mind that what you're looking at is literally the afterglow from the big bang itself. This stuff is visible from anywhere in the universe, it ought to look roughly the same everywhere, and once again, Sector _i_'s microwave background looks _nothing_ at all like ours. Sector _i_ is in another universe, and we have the data to show it."

The twin blobs were replaced by a very large white lens flare and a pinkish speck.

"Another object of interest was first spotted in this photograph, which was obtained roughly a year after we began receiving data. It seems that most of our probes entered Sector _i_ near this star. Of course, that's just another main-sequence sun, roughly 0.87 times the mass of Lylatt, and slightly dimmer and yellower, but otherwise uninteresting. That tiny pink speck, however, is another matter entirely. After much experimentation and _many_ lost probes, we were able to obtain this image of the object in question."

A blue marble, viewed edge on as a circle, filled the screen: Titanium dioxide white clouds swirled and churned in its deep cerulean blue atmosphere, floating atop ultramarine indigo oceans and pthalocyanine/hooker green continents, the land peppered by patches of yellow ochre and indian red for good measure. It was like Corneria in many ways, yet in every way it was so very, very different. In fact, possibly owing to novelty of the image and the significance of that which it depicted, it might have been one of the most beautiful things Fox had ever seen, orders of magnitude better than the dull greys and greens of the postapocalyptic landscape that was Corneria. In a way, he almost envied his son, who had yet to set eyes upon the desolate plains and radio-unstable ghost towns, both because he'd spent half his time in the basement of Site 19 under the watch of Dr. M., and because he'd been blind from birth, and literally had not seen his ruined homeworld with his own eyes.

"So, you're looking for a dashing spaceman to set foot on another world?"

"Well yes, but actually, no. It's not going to be like that at all."

"But whoever you send over _is_ going to land there, right?"

"Yes."

"Where do I sign?"

"We'll get the papers later, but we've still got _a lot_ to go over."

"Well I'm all ears, so do tell."

"OK, well as you can see here, there are a variety of biomes present on the surface. Like our own planet, the majority of its surface appears to be covered by oceans. It is evidently within the so-called "goldilocks zone" of its parent star, and we know that the planet, which we're calling _Otierro_ isn't tidally locked to it. We have yet to ascertain its exact rotational period, but we estimate its day to be anywhere from 19 to 67 hours."

"Otierro?"

"A portmanteau of "otro" and "tierro", which translates literally to "other dirt". Hey, don't ask me, it was Dr. Imahara's idea."

The aforementioned Doctor, who was fluent in Spanish, chuckled.

The photo of Otierro the blue marble was replaced with another, this time depicting a two thick crescent shapes, the smaller one grey, and the longer one a deep indigo, accompanied by spidery webs of orangeish-yellow that protruded into the darkness of the planet's night side.

"Here we see that Otierro has a moon, and a _big_ one at that. Our best guess is that it's a captured dwarf planet, easily 70% the mass of MacBeth, but we can't be sure at this point."

Fox, who had seen many photos of the night side of his own homeworld, found his attention being drawn, almost immediately, to the amber specks that dotted the night side.

"Wait-" he said, pointing to the Otierro's dark side. "-aren't those-"

"High pressure sodium vapor discharge lamps? Yes, they are. No joke, we ran ran 'em through the spectrometer: Same 589 nanometer D-line emissions and everything."

"...Are you saying this Sector _i_ place is inhabited?"

The doctor cleared her throat. "While it's awfully hard to be _certain_ of anything with what little data we have at this point, intelligent, surface dwelling lifeforms are _by far_ the most likely explanation for these observations. This image alone, however, was not sufficient to prove they exist."

"So what'd you guys do next, or is this it?"

Dr. Byron was almost insulted by the question. "For all we knew at the time, those dots were but lightning bolts in an atmosphere of naked sodium! Do you really think we'd send you or anyone else there to land if we _didn't_ know more? As a matter of fact, that last photo was only taken a week ago, whereas this one's from last year. Granted, we study anomalous objects here, but we're still _scientists_ goddammit, and so we did what anyone who deserves the title would do: Gather more data. And _boy_ did we."

The photo of Otierro and its moon was replaced with a fluffy green void, bisected by a thin black line that faded into a thicker, brown bar near the upper left corner of the image. It was a forest, viewed from space.

"Now at this point, we'd been so focused on working out whether or not Sector _i_ was in our own universe that we hadn't really stopped to sniff the flowers. We were also starting to get better at sending complex electronics through the wormhole and bringing them back in one piece, as well as actually getting them close enough to Otierro to get any decent pictures. We sent several cameras equipped with telephoto lenses through, and most of them didn't actually photograph the target. For whatever reason, radio communication through the wormhole is all but impossible, so we've had to pretty much program our probes with a very elaborate set of instructions, and hope they don't explode over there. We also have yet to establish much in the way of a positioning system over there, so it's even harder to photograph the same place twice. Nevertheless, we did eventually get a good shot of the surface, which is onscreen now."

Dr. Byron pointed to the green stuff. "Now once again, we can't be _sure_, but we're pretty sure those are photosynthetic life forms."

"Trees?"

"We think. For one, the spectra taken of the atmosphere seems to indicate the presence of life, and free oxygen. Oxygen, of course, is highly reactive, and generally doesn't persist without being constantly replenished. Life, meanwhile, requires energy to, well, do literally anything, and most of the biomes we've studied are ultimately based on energy extracted via photosynthesis. That, and the observed color, leads us to suspect to suspect that those things are, indeed, trees."

She turned her attention to the brown bar.

"This, however, leaves very little room for doubt. Two parallel bars, linked by other rectangles, atop a tall formation, which judging by the shadows is hollow _and_ supported by a regular pattern of girders. This is almost certainly a railroad bridge. We also listened for radio waves, and though we have yet to decipher any of them, Otierro is a very noisy place. With this in mind, we can confidently say that there are people living here, and though it may not seem like it, we actually know quite a lot about the Otierrans already. Those little yellow specks in the other picture, for one, show that they see roughly the same wavelengths of light that we do, and that vision is likely their dominant sense. Most of us don't navigate a room by echolocation or smell, and it's likely that they don't either, otherwise they wouldn't have nearly as many lights out after dark. The lights themselves are evidence of relatively advanced chemistry, industry, and electronics. Sodium is a very reactive element, and unlike oxygen, it isn't readily produced by trees. Simply purifying the stuff requires a working knowledge of chemistry, powering them requires an electrical grid, and having that many of them across Otierro's surface implies that a well developed industry exists on their world."

"So, there are aliens on a planet like ours. Cool. Now what do I do?"

This time, it was Feldman who spoke. "Glad you asked."

* * *

**Author's note:**

This chapter was written primarily for two reasons: First, why the hell is Fox McCloud of all people the one making first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization? As it turns out, it actually makes a lot of sense for him to be the one to go. Also, a long time ago, some anon once complained that I was far more concerned with bragging about on how smart I was than telling a story, and this chapter was my attempt to set the record straight. _This_, ladies and gentlemen, is what it looks like when a nerd with no life and a +2 standard deviation IQ is flexing.

Oh, what's that? Technobabble isn't clever? Actually, I am also proud to say that there is _no_ technobabble whatsoever in this chapter! Yes, that's _real_ jargon, and as far as I know, it's being used correctly. _Yay?_

Lastly, no Crichton-esque story is complete without top secret classified shit and a briefing scene.

Coming up next chapter: Piloting shenanigans!


	5. Need to know basis, Mr McCloud

**Hello, dear reader:**

**Gee, we're already 4 chapters in! Hard to believe it's been only 2 weeks or so since I posted chapter 1, although I guess that happens when you write most of it out in advance.**

**Now that Fox has (presumably) accepted the mission, where will he go? What will he do, and what sort of ungodly horrors will he uncover while doing so?**

_**And will we ever get to see the city of Zootopia? **_**Find out now!**

* * *

The interrogation cell was lit by a single bulb, as they all were.

**"From the blue it shall come, and into it you will vanish."**

* * *

Fox McCloud, clad in a light grey pilot's jumpsuit, sat on a metal bench within the cavernous, dull olive colored interior of the osprey, as all sorts of strange nostalgias swam through his head, the startup whine of the enormous turboprops, outside on their monolithic horizontal columns, bringing a toothy smile to his face.

Back when these aircraft had been brand new, a teenaged Fox had trained on them, learning, among other things, how to jump out of a moving aircraft and not die. Now, he was in his mid 30's, and although his new mission wouldn't entail _jumping_ from any sort of plane, the part where he stuck the landing was still critical to its. As for why the anomalous materials people had a _heavily armed_ tiltrotor aircraft on standby at all times, well...

"Hey!" Fox said, pointing to the 50 caliber machine gun stowed beside the aft door. "What's with that?"

"This ain't a training aircraft, Fox." Dr. Feldman was personally overseeing this exercise, as he usually did for all things pertaining to Sector _i_. "We actually have to use it once in a while."

"On what?"

"Need to know basis, Mr. McCloud."

They sat for a moment, as the turboprops slowly came to life, growing louder by the second.

"Well can you give me a hint?"

Feldman, who now had the noise-cancelling headphones on, was speaking through a mic. Even though it was the same man, it sounded completely different now for a variety of reasons. For one, the rhythmic thwomping of the rotor blades outside had been all but silenced, and Feldman's voice, received directly from his mouth and played symmetrically from both of the speakers in Fox's ears, had lost all directionality to it, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

"This base is out in the middle of nowhere, and for good reason."

"And to think I leave my son with you guys." Fox couldn't tell if he was sighing or chuckling. In a way, he was doing both, sorta like whenever you're the butt of the very self-depreciating joke you're currently telling.

"Oh don't get me or Dr. M. started:" Feldman responded to Fox's sarcasm with his usual 90% seriousness.

"Ah yes-" Fox quipped "the _bad_ man. _Very_ reassuring."

"Well look: Off putting or not, Dr. M. is highly qualified for task. Besides, those people out there simply have no business being left alone with a child who, _for the doctor's sake_, needs to be sedated to receive a Flu shot. Kids get mad and break stuff sometimes, y'know?"

"So _that's_ why we're 200 clicks from the nearest city."

"No, Fox, there's a _lot_ of weird shit out there, and 5988 is-"

"_Feldman._" They'd been over this.

"Sorry, _Marcus_ is barely the tip of the iceberg. I mean, We're talking weird enough to resurrect Andross. _Twice._"

Fox, of course, had been the guy who'd ended up having to kill Andross all 3 times. "Tell me about it."

The shaking decidedly intensified, as if Fox were back at at a Midwestern theme park, riding _The Beast_. This shaking, paradoxically, was joined by a floaty, bobbing feeling like you were in a canoe, that signified that the VTOL aircraft was now hovering off of the ground. It was one of those sensations unique to aerospace, and was all but impossible to truly conceptualize unless you had experienced it for yourself. In other words, when a certain pretentious bourgeoisie doormat of a Frenchman declared, _47 years before powered flight, no less_, that they knew the _entire_ spectrum of human existence, let's just say that they were so positively bursting at the seams with shit that they put a diaper strapped to the ass of an elephant with explosive diarrhea to shame, although it'd take them well over an hour to do so, monolithic purple prose and all.*

"Now as we've discussed, you're set to arrive roughly 10 clicks above the surface of the planet. We'd put you lower, but we don't want you spawning _inside_ of a mountain, and the height gives your paraglider some much needed range. In other words, you could literally show up anywhere on the other side, and you've got to be ready for anything you might find there."

"You still don't know, do you? What it's really like there?" As he said this, the tiltrotor rolled sharply, and turned.

"To the ability that we are able to measure, the physics and chemistry over there are identical to ours. The air probably isn't toxic-"

"_Probably?!_" Feldman was a scientist, and therefore took great precaution to only make claims of absolute certainty when he _really_ meant it. Fox McCloud was _not_ a scientist, and interpreted it as such, reading far more into "probably" than he should've.

"We've been testing it for months, but we can't be _certain_."

"That doesn't make any sense! Either it's safe or it isn't."

"People have died in the shower, ya' know. They slip, they fall, they hit their head on something hard and then _boom,_ they dead. There is no such thing as safety, Fox, there is only a relative lack of danger."

"...OK, good point. Anyway, you were saying?"

"My point is that no, we don't know what it's like there. I mean, we've managed to collect a few spoonfuls of surprisingly boring dirt, but we're running out of experiments to perform that can be done without a man on the ground. _That_ is where you come in."

Leveling out, the V-22 continued to climb.

McCloud turned his attention to the silvery bullet shaped thing in the cargo hold. It had been hammered together from sheet metal, and a small plexiglass windshield jutted out from near the aft end of the vessel. On both sides were folding beams with propellers on the ends, each powered by a high end brushless motor that was roughly half the size of McCloud's clenched fist. The motors and their props were tucked away against the sides of the aircraft. Towards the bottom were a trio of similarly retractable landing gear, which were currently extended. Indeed, the whole thing seemed as if it had been built to squeeze through a very tight hole.

"So this is the thing I'll be flying?"

"Pretty much. Experiments, tents, firearms, it's all right here in the storage bay. The main parachute is stowed mid fuselage, and the props deploy once you arrive. By our calculations, the fuel and altitude will give a 318 kilometer range, so if you show up over the ocean and you see land on the horizon, go for it. Speaking of which, that's what we're going to attempt today: You will deploy at 2000 meters, try to land on the target."

"Didn't you say I'd deploy at 10 thousand?"

"Yes, but we're not simulating the mission today. Right now, you're learning to fly this thing."

"Doesn't look too hard to me."

"It's not now, but we have to be sure."

"I suppose. Now about the target?"

"It's marked by a giant red 'X' shape, 25 meters to a side. You can't miss it!"

Fox hated that word, and not because of some hippy-dippy _think positive_ bullshit dogmatism. No, Fox hated that word for an entirely different and very personal reason. When James had received that final assignment, Fox had pleaded with him. He'd known even then that something was amiss, he knew it was a suicide mission, and oh how he had begged him to stay! And what did his father say back? "I can't do that, son." As far as Fox was concerned, these either were, or might as well have been, the last words of James McCloud, and he hated them all the more because of it.

And when Andross had attacked, and when he'd dropped out of the Cornerian Military Academy to fight back, that one goddamn word, _can't_, it came at him like a hydra, rearing its hideous head at every turn. Friends, enemies, counselors, "can't" was everywhere. Peppy Hare, Bill Grey, Wolf O'Donnell, they'd all said it. "You _can't_ be serious, Fox.", "Graduation's three months away. You _can't_ drop out now, dude!", "I _can't_ let you do that, StarFox.".

It was an understatement to say that Fox McCloud, counterexample extraordinaire, _hated_ that word. What he hated most about it was that almost every time someone said it, they were misusing the damn thing. 9 times out of 10, when someone said "can't", they _really_ meant "It's not a good idea.", or "I'm going to assume they're not because I wouldn't." or, at worst: "I don't want you to, so I'm going to deceive you into believing it's impossible." It was an insidious, corrupting word, _manipulating_ people on a subconscious level,. On this last point in particular, Fox, having married a psychic, had learned much about subconscious persuasion, and was all too aware now of the poisonous effect of _can't_ on the mind. "They can't do that." Many a military strategist had said, only for the enemy army to do it anyway and slaughter them all. "You can't do that, you can't escape." Said the dictator, who relied on their gullibility, their _Ignorance_ of the wide open door to stay in power.

Now where was I again? Oh, right, Dr. Feldman had just finished describing the target. What, a third-person omniscient narrator can't lose their train of thought? See! There it is again: _can't_, and once again, it's wrong, because as a matter of fact, we _can_ get distracted.

You know, I really think Fox has a point here: "Can't" is a bullshit word.

"It's marked by a giant red 'X' shape, 25 meters to a side. You can't miss it!" Said Feldman.

Fox concealed his disgust at that word. "Oh you wouldn't believe the dumb shit I've seen people do in planes. Speaking of, ejector seat's the red ripcord on the right, right?"

"Yes, Mr. McCloud. Please try not to use it on your first flight."

Over the intercom, the pilot's voice could be heard, coming from the same nebulous non-locality as Feldman's: "Altitude reached."

Fox got up, scaled a short ladder, more a series of handholds in the fuselage of the highly modified paramotor trike than anything else, and climbed down, feet first, into the cockpit. As for the vehicle in question, the drop pod was held in place by a pair of thick clamps that were bolted to the floor.

At the rear of the plane the door swung down, turning into a sort of ramp, or perhaps a red carpet that wasn't actually red, inviting Fox into the blue yonder beyond it, and the foreign skies of Otierro. The V-22's nose was pitched just slightly upwards, and so to Fox, strapped in and gazing out the rear door, it felt like he was being suspended over the horizon.

"Releasing in 3, 2, 1."

Contrary to this feeling of suspension, the silver bullet merely accelerated at a leisurely pace once the clamps released. To be completely honest, Feldman felt it just barely necessary to give it a slight _push_ as it left the plane, tumbling just a bit in the propwash as it left the ramp and fell. The drogue chute deployed almost immediately, followed seconds later by the main wing, which slowly draped upwards and filled with air, snapping open with pneumatic gusto as it finished inflating. At this point, he was more or less gliding, and his next thing to do was to start the engine. Looking around for a ripcord to start the motor, he found one and yanked it, realizing just a fraction of second too late that he'd pulled the wrong one, and had actually deployed the ejector seat.

This was, of course, _not_ a supersonic dogfighter, and thus the ejector seat was far less..._enthusiastic_...than was typical on the sort of things Fox had flown for a living. Instead of what might as well have been a JATO can strapped to his ass, violently rocketing him away from the plane, the pilot's chair was merely _pushed_ out by a pair of springs. The surprisingly stable paraglider continued onwards, as Fox McCloud, still in his seat, gracefully arced above, over, and behind the thing he was supposed to be landing, only to find that he was now accelerating downwards at an alarming rate.

He had a clear view of the surrounding glasslands now, and it wasn't long before he spotted the target.

"Dammit, McCloud."

"Yeah, I know." he sighed into the mic. "Pulled the wrong ripcord."

Fox, double checking that he was about to yank the correct little plastic thing this time, pulled on yet another ripcord, activating the backup parachute. It was also a parawing, and deployed much like the first one. Several seconds later, Fox, who was now smirking like a naughty child, had realized that his backup chute just so happened to be a parawing, and that he could therefore actually steer the thing.

"I got a visual on the target. REPEAT, I have a visual on the target. We are go for landing."

Several minutes later, the MTF people were loading the mostly intact paraglider onto a truck, and Fox, coming in at an almost suicidal rate of decent before pulling up at the last minute and swinging like an acrobat hanging from the trapeze in order to slow down, had made an almost perfect landing, right at the center of the target. "Y'aaaar, me mateys! X marks the spot!" he said.

Feldman rolled his eyes, pretending to be angry as he stifled a chuckle. Even when he was borderline incompetent, Fox McCloud was one hell of a pilot.

* * *

_**Meanwhile:**_

Even though he'd been working here for almost 9 months, he still felt uneasy about bringing her here. But today was a special day, and unlike last time, he would stop at nothing to make it worth something to her.

She'd had her "taming" last year. Even now, the screams of his daughter echoed in Finnick's mind, as he was once again overwhelmed by an all encompassing, emasculating feeling of helplessness, for the one thing he loved most was writhing in agony, and there was nothing whatsoever he could do to make the pain stop. All chompers had to be broken, he'd known this from day 0. But seeing this city crush his daughter still broke what little of his own heart there was left to break all over again, all the same.

Nick, who'd gotten his collar off for the first time in a quarter century during a visit to a doctor, had been in it for the high, his fleeting memories of _happiness_ driving him to insomnia as he struggled to bring this dream of his to life. Clawhauser, meanwhile, was in it for the money, and always had been. "If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that..." and so forth. Finnick, however, was here for an entirely different reason. Finnick's parents had been the sort of dogmatic, masochistic, self-loathing narcissist types who would've made Uncle Tom blush. This description most especially applied to his mother, who had _voluntarily_ chosen to give birth with her collar still on. Now, as per the Harmony Act, a young predator had to be collared no later than their 6th birthday, and most parents, understandably, put it off as long as they could. Finnick's mother, meanwhile, had withheld her ravenous newborn from her milk until he had been both collared _and_ declawed (and in that order, no less). Indeed, the day Finnick had come home to find his mother's corpse on the sofa, having finally dropped dead from the heart attack that T.A.M.E. collars so often made inevitable, had been the happiest day of his life, followed by the happiest night of his life, when he finally ran away for good (the first time he tried, she'd dragged him back and broken both of his legs). This was also the night he met Nicholas Wilde, out on the streets.

Yes, Nick had his high, and Clawhauser had his money. But for Finnick, who lacked even the _memory_ of real joy, this was the exact opposite of personal. Exactly 1 year ago, the state had forced him to levy misery upon his own daughter, and tonight, even if only for a few hours, he was going to try and make her happy. But it wasn't easy. Building this place was hard enough, and swallowing the risk that came with it had been the single biggest gamble of his life. Even now, this was _his_ thing. If they got busted, _he_ might never see the light of day again.

Because _of course_ the prisons here had no windows. Nope, no windows. _Not even a single one._

But the moment he brought his daughter inside, she'd be chained to the place. The moment she received the gift, he'd swallow an ever greater risk. No longer would it be merely _his_ life on the line, but hers as well. Now let's make one thing clear: Finnick, who was not even close to being on good terms with his ex-girlfriend, was by no means a family man. As far as he was concerned, she was the cheating bitch he'd be most likely to meet in Hell. But he loved his daughter more than life itself, and bringing her here was scarier for him than the prospect of negotiating a loan with Kolsov. But as hard as it was to bring her here, he couldn't bring himself not to. To the man who would actually sacrifice everything for her, seeing her writhe and know there was nothing to be done had driven him half insane.

The van pulled in to a space in a lot by a cliff, a small building that had once been a fast food joint sitting in the center invoking images of an island in a sea of city. Beyond the cliff, on the waterfront, sat a relic of the early 20th century: A barrel shaped warehouse that had once been used to store fish and, as prohibition came and went, moonshine whiskey. Ironically, it was now a proper speakeasy, complete with blacked out windows and a secret entrance, yet the booze itself had been forbidden from its cavernous interior, as it was exactly the kind of speakeasy that was meant for the whole family.

It was a dull, cloudy twilight, the asphalt damp in pre-storm drizzle. What was now a clinic in a lot seemed so hopelessly far away, every step a circumnavigation 'round a world of paranoia. Yet he was thrust along, as if by the hand of God himself, and soon enough he stood under the awning, the door towering over him as a warm, incandescent yellow spilled out into the dusk. An enormous "u", printed on the door as part of "Bug Burga", was placed in just such a way as to cast a curved shadow, perhaps a bruise, upon his neck.

"Come on, Jasmine." He sighed. "Time for the surprise."

Finnick, standing at the point of no return, braced himself and jumped, not from a building, but for the handle; As much as they talked talk about equality, in his experience, the city simply wasn't built for people like him. Bringing his feet up, he kicked at the door, the one thing separating him from sweet, sweet release, as if it were the stool upon which he stood, and forced the enormous door to budge, plunging he and his daughter into the light as they stepped into the other side. The lobby was a small, dingy place, and a half-dozen predators or so were making smalltalk.

"Ah, there you are, right on time!" Said Nick, leaning against the front desk, grinning as always as he subtly scratched his forearm. Once upon a time, he'd been a con man, swindling the gullible. Sometimes, he was sincere, "high on the air" as he put it, uncollared and prancing about in his old warehouse as the breeze ventilated the irritated skin on his neck, while other times it was little more than a mask atop an empty shell of a man. But it was always that same shit-eating grin. He got up, grabbed a few sheets from the counter, and stepped towards Finnick.

"Alright, now that we're all here, I'd like to begin with a short invocation" Indeed, the air had such a potent high for him that it had driven Nicholas Wilde to rediscover God. Once a fallen-out Catholic, he was now a hardcore, born-again, _praise Jesus_ protestant, and although he rarely did it like this (only hypocrites pray in public, y'know), he had invariably said a prayer or two before commencing a night of work.

"Nick, we've been over this." Finnick's experience of god was little more than a quote or two out of that old book his mother had held in his left hand while she beat him half to death with her right.

"Yes, I know, your mother was the devil's mouthpeice."

"She might as well have been Satan herself."

"_Don't you dare say that name in here, Finn._"

"Oh!...Sorry." Indeed, they _had_ been over this. Nicholas Wilde took his faith very seriously now.

"Well look, my point here is that today is a _special_ day...Dare I say for more reasons than one?" He said, as he motioned towards Jasmine. "Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself, m'am?"

Finnick restrained the urge to step between Wilde, the others, and his daughter. Sure, the grandstanding red fox was a good friend of his, but Finnick was all too familiar with Nick, and what he was capable of resorting to in order to get the job done and make ends meet (both before and after he'd found God), and suffice it to say that he wasn't quite comfortable with putting Jasmine anywhere near the former con-fox. "Well, this here is my daughter, Jasmine."

"Well _by God_ it's a pleasure to meet you, Jasmine!" He said, thrusting his hand out as if he were an honest, perfectly legitimate businessman. And, having found God and ditched his cons for an underground theme park, this was more or less what he thought of himself as now, complete with a cheap suit and tie (never mind his mob connections).

"Uh, hi." Said Jasmine.

"Now look here, everybody, because I've got something important to show ya'! You see, I was in my office, and Clawhauser came to me, yes he sure did."

"Who's Clawhauser?"

"Oh, my apologies, I forgot to introduce us. This right here is Dr. Marge Badger; she's our head mechanic. And that jolly man back there is Benjamin Clawhauser. Those two wolves are our bouncers, Llary and Gary, and that nice lady there is Francesca." The fox leaned in, as if it were a secret. "She runs the cotton candy machines."

"You have cotton candy here?!"

"Oh we have _much_ more than that, as you will soon see."

Soon, what a word! To an adult, "soon" had many meanings: less than 60 seconds, within the hour, by the end of the week, that sort of thing. To a child, however, whenever an adult said "soon" to them, it really only had one meaning: **Never**. As such, her excitement began to falter.

Nick stood back up, addressing the rest of the room. "Now, where was I? Oh, right. Skye here is one of our other mechanics, she and Dr. Badger keep cyclotron spinning."

"Speaking of which, I have to go." She said.

"What's a cyclotron?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out very soon!" There it was again! _Soon_. Damn that word (and _can't_, while we're at it)! The suspense was killing her!

"Who are you, anyway?"

"I am Nicholas Wilde, well technically _Dr._ Nicholas Wilde-" he said, gesturing to the certificate on the wall that made this whole scheme _technically_ not-illegal. "-but you can call me Nick. I'm the ringleader around here."

He shifted to address the room. "Now, as you know, Clawhauser is the accountant, doing all his trickery what with the numbers,and the spreadsheets, and the checkbook, and those fancy-pants mechanical pencils and the moo-lah and such. Well he came to me, in my office, yes he sure did, and _guess what_ he had to say!"

"Well go on Nick, tell us!" Said the badger.

"Well Clawhauser came in, and he said, get this: He'd just did the math, _double checked it and everything_, and I've got it right here!" Said the fox, revealing the papers to the room. "So Clawhauser did the math, and it says, _right on this paper here_, that tonight is gonna' be a _special_ night, oh yes!" Nick paused, taking a breath. He was clearly excited over something.

"Come on Nick, what's it say!" Even in spite of his terror at having his daughter here, Finnick, like most of the other employees found Nick's spirited attitude contagious.

"It says so, and I have the math to _prove it_, that to-night is the night we buy our freedom back from Kolsov! Yes siree it does, says so right here! Says that if we draw a good crowd tonight,_ Lord willing_, then we _will_ have enough money in our vault to pay off the loan, _in its entirety,_ two weeks ahead of schedule!"

Their jaws hit the floor.

"Clawhauser, you can't be serious!" Honey stared at the spreadsheets in disbelief.

"I am, Honey. Even with the added expenses, anything above 120% nightly average leaves us in the black." Keep in mind that, Friday night and all, such an outcome was likely.

"Yes indeed, we are poised to pay off that loan _tonight_, and _that_ is cause for a celebration! And with that out of the way, I'd like to begin tonight's work with an invocation."

"Fine." Finnick muttered. He was more of a guy kept out of church by his own bad memories than a proper unbeliever, but he still didn't like this pray-before-everything crap. Skye, however, was in fact a convinced atheist, and as she had several inspections to perform before this place opened, she'd walked away several minutes ago.

"Oh Lord, please let these numbers be true. Oh Lord, do draw in those crowds, Oh good Lord, do keep that cash flowing! Thy will be done on this Earth as it is in Heaven, in Your Son's name we pray, _amen_."

Opening his eyes, he looked around, and noted that Jasmine still looked a bit confused, and not even slightly excited. "_What's wrong?_" he wanted to say. Instead, he realized why she wasn't terribly excited, and said this:

"My, my, it seems like you don't quite understand what _exactly_ it is that we do around here."

"Well-" said Finnick "-tonight is her 7th birthday, and it's a surprise."

The significance of this statement slammed Nick in the face like a speeding train. He should've been used to it by now, 7th birthdays, after all, were one of their most popular demographics. Yet still he wasn't, and Nicholas Wilde paused for a moment to regain his composure. "Well then what do you say we show her just _what_ exactly it is that we've been doing here?" Not even waiting for an answer, the fox was making his way to the closet, which led to stairs, which led to the basement, and all the wonderful things it contained.

"Quickly now, before the others show up."

And so they followed, through a hall, and into a broom closet. Once inside, Nick bent over and jammed a flat-head screwdriver into a slot on a grey metal box on the wall, deliberately installed near the floor, and decisively cranked it to the left, gently opening the panel to reveal row after row of orange switches protruding from light grey plastic boxes. Gesturing to one very specific circuit breaker, Nicholas addressed the little fennec.

"Uh, Jasmine, was it?"

"Yes."

"Can you do something for me, please? When I say 'go', I need you to throw this switch. Not that one, not that other one either, and_ especially_ not that one. No, I need you to flip _this exact switch!_ Can you do that for me?"

The industrial plastic felt strong and oddly cold in her hands, and, after a nontrivial _heave_, she flipped the switch.

"I like the effort, but I need you to do it when I say 'go', because there are _two_ switches that have to be thrown at the same time. Not a moment before, and not a moment later! Can you do that for me?" These ongoing theatrics made Clawhauser roll his eyes, while Dr. Badger cringed internally. She'd gone to great pains to set up this particular system, and that included programming a margin of error into the circuits that checked these switches. Never mind a single 'moment', whatever the hell that even was, for as a matter of fact the door would open even if one switch was thrown a whole 0.39 seconds after the other. And of course, central nervous system signal propagation speed variations and all, throwing both switches during the exact same unit of planck-time was so unlikely that the odds against such a feat were astronomically high in a very literal sense. A pair of foxes could try to throw a pair of switches at the exact same moment, one on each planet in the galaxy, and none would get it. Dr. Badger knew this, Nicholas Wilde knew that she knew, and unlike Honey, he didn't care in the slightest.

"Now I'm going to go over here, and when I say 'go', I will flip this switch. And I need you to do it at the same time. Got it?"

Honey grumbled in annoyance as Nick shuffled over to the other switch.

"OK, are you ready?"

"Yes."

"On my mark...3, 2, 1, _banana!_"

Jasmine, who had been expecting 'go', flipped the switch anyway.

"Gotcha!"

"Nick, can we just get to work, please?" Clawhauser sighed.

"Aw, you guys are _no fun,_ you know that?"

"If _this_ is your idea of fun, then why the hell did you have us build all that shit down there?" Honey retorted, as she took Jasmine's place at the switch. Finnick, who still clung to the delusion of his daughter's innocence, promptly scowled at Honey for daring to say "shit" around Jasmine. She noticed, and returned with a bitchy glare of her own.

"Hey, Mr. Goodie-two-shoes, just be glad she hasn't seen _the special room._" She chuckled momentarily, as she and Clawhauser flipped the switches. "I mean, it _was_ your idea."

What had once been a wall was now swinging away like a door, revealing a long, twisting tunnel that seemed primarily lit by Christmas lights.

"Daddy, is that the special room?"

"No."

"Can we go see it?"

"_No_."

"Why not?"

"It's a very bad place. You don't want to see it." As inevitable as 'the talk' was, Finnick really didn't want to have this conversation now, especially not _right now_.

The badger, who was already making her way to the stairs, glanced over her shoulder "He's lying."

"Honey-"

"Couples, teenagers especially, pay us good money to be in there." Her voice now echoed off the tunnel walls, her taunts lingering and shifting like a malevolent fairy. "_Alone._"

"-_not another word_." He snapped, as he motioned for Jasmine to follow

"Wow, Finnick the puritan, I never would've guessed." She snapped back. "Jesus Christ, you're even worse than Nick."

And now, Nick and Finnick were both staring daggers at her as they descended.

"You heard him, not another word or you're doing sentry duty tonight." Nick ordered.

"_Fine,_ you hypocritical..." She paused to find a word that would be acceptable to say around a 7 year old. She decided to ham it up. "..._meanies!_"

They continued walking in awkward non-silence, their footsteps reverberating every which way as a resounding _THUD_ echoed in from behind, for Clawhauser back up topside had shut the door. He, the bouncers, and one of the doctors stayed behind. Their job was to process customers and keep an eye out for the police. The others were either following them into the basement, or had already gone down there to get a headstart. And, as they were scheduled to open for the night in less than 45 minutes, they needed every second.

Finally, they were nearing the bottom of the stairs. Much like the stairs themselves, the landing, which measured approximately 5 meters to a side, had been partitioned into two lanes by a set of dividers, which hooked a sharp left turn and continued all the way to a wall. Servicing the two lanes were two doors, a fancy one marked "ENTER" and a much plainer, almost depressing "exit". The room itself was presided over by a life-size cardboard cutout of _the_ Nicholas Wilde, wearing his trademark grin as he winked to the audience. To the cutout's left was a sign that read "CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?". After all this place was technically a speakeasy, of sorts.

"Here we are, everyone! Although I suppose we're not actually open yet, Jasmine, I bid you welcome to Wild Times!" He said, throwing the door open. Most of the lights were still off on the other side, and Skye, now in denim overalls and a hard hat, was standing in the doorway, blocking most of the view, much to Nick's chagrin.

"Oh there you are, Mr. Wilde. I was _just_ looking for you! Unfortunately, the Roar-O-Coaster will be down for the next hour at least, something's wrong with the lift hill motor."

"Darn!" He said, stamping the ground with his right foot like a cartoon character.

Then, the lights came on in sequence, and the vixen, who somehow had already covered her fur and her clothes in thick black grease, stepped out of the way, revealing the legendary cyclotron in all its glory.

"That being said, the cyclotron is working perfectly."

Truly it was a sight to behold! An immense metal wheel, a bit over 9 meters in diameter and spinning at 51 revolutions per minute, hoisted into the air at a 60 degree angle by an equally mammoth hydraulic arm, the machinery emitting a deep mechanical roaring sound as it heaved the wheel even higher. Nicholas Wilde had very intentionally placed it near the park entrance, a mechanical marvel and/or monstrosity that drew Jasmine's attention _immediately_. And then Jasmine saw that...no, _impossible!_ Somehow, in a manner that seemed to defy all logic, there was a mammal strapped to the wheel, centrifugal force plastering his body to the inside of the enormous metal barrel in which he was spun. Although it seemed as if they were dicking around when there was work to be done, the mechanic was actually inspecting the ride, listening for the subtle creaks and groans that old machines produced. He knew what it sounded like when it was working and, more importantly, what it sounded like when it _wasn't_. Skye had finished her inspection of the lifting arm and the hydraulic pumps, but the ride had been partly dismantled last night, and someone had to make sure the harnesses still worked, and that the cyclotron could handle an imbalanced passenger load. Think of it like this: If the mechanics were unwilling to ride the damn thing, was it really safe? Some may have been in it for the money, but Nick was in it for the high, the smiles, and the children, and the thought of one of them getting hurt on his rides had cost him an order of magnitude more sleep than Kolsov and his wise guys.

Speaking of kids, there were two things that needed to be taken care of.

"Places, everyone! You all should know what to do by now." Nick shifted his posture to address the pair of Fennecs that stood near his feet. "Um, Finn, as exciting as this place is-"

"ROCK!" One of the mechanics shouted. A second or so later, as if to demonstrate Nick's concern, a large wrench that was probably heavy enough to kill a man impacted something near the floor with a dull thud that could nevertheless be heard throughout the entire warehouse. Several minutes later, a dizzy looking mechanic with a now broken hardhat would decide to take a sick day and exit the building. In retrospect, having been nowhere near the building during the ZPD raid (and therefore the only employee to escape), the mechanic in question would go on to consider themselves one of the luckiest men alive, so lucky in fact that upon hearing of the raid, he refused to push it any further and high-tailed it to Zootopia Central Station, where he promptly booked a one-way high speed ticket to the farthest city he could name, but for now it hurt like a man who'd stuck a toothpick under the nail of his big toe before kicking the nearest wall as hard as he could, and the mechanic was complaining as such, practically inventing a new language entirely composed of expletives, vulgarities, and profanities as he went.

"-it won't be open for another 40 minutes at least, and I can't imagine you'd want her getting hurt...or finding..."

Finnick fucked the- _**CONNECTED!**_ I meant to say that he **_connected_** the dots: as in, he'd make sure to steer her clear of the dungeon. You see, after catching yet another pair of horny teenagers making out behind the scenery, they'd realized that the demand for this most adult of services, even in an otherwise kid friendly park, was considerably greater than they anticipated. Then again, this was one of _two_ collar free speakeasies in the entire city, and considering what lengths predator couples had to go to simply to conceive a child, let alone enjoy themselves in the process (comedians often cracked jokes about an elaborate ritual involving cattle prods, funnels, and a plunger), they really should've seen this coming. Unfortunately, when one was forced to wear a device that punished you for having emotions, dry marriages and dead bedrooms were the rule, rather than the exception. At any rate, the one room love hotel itself really wasn't all _that_ bad. It was quite simply a small, unmarked room in the back of the warehouse with a mattress and a plastic bedsheet. It wasn't advertised _at all_ in the city, there were no signs pointing to it in the park, and the room itself was completely innocuous and always locked. In a way it was a speakeasy within a speakeasy, and despite relying solely on word of mouth to attract new customers, the little dungeon was starting to sell out two full days in advance. Nick had even considered setting up a second one.

"...So how about you give Jasmine here a tour? after you see yourself and your daughter to the check in booth, of course."

"Is this the surprise?" Said Jasmine.

"No, the surprise is over there by that kiosk. What do you say we get that _awful_ collar off, and then I'll show you my turntables?" Little Jasmine's jaw practically hit the floor. "Happy birthday!"

Nick, meanwhile, was halfway through the door to his office, the cracks in his facade already starting to reappear. Shutting the door behind him, he flipped a switch, plunging the darkness into a sea of monochrome fluorescent green as the control systems booted up. One could be forgiven for thinking this room was the secret lair of some cartoon supervillain, and indeed, it performed a similar function: Within this office, Nicholas Wilde had access to CCTV footage that covered most of the park itself, the backstage loading dock, and even the parking lot outside the fake clinic. From here, he could monitor the rides, micromanage the janitors, or lock down the entire facility at the push of a button.

Among other things, this office contained the one and only firearm in Wild Times: a Colt Peacemaker with exactly one shot, just in case. Just like a cartoon supervillain, Nicholas Wilde also had a backstory: In what he now considered a past life, Nick had been to prison exactly once, and he had zero intentions of ever going back. On top of this, he'd been straddling the line of outright depression for well over a decade and a half, and it was safe to say that he'd go down with the ship if Wild Times were ever to strike a metaphorical 'berg and sink, and not just because he was captain.

And so he kept the gun, just in case.

The fox placed a small Pyrex beaker atop a second hand hot plate, both of which he'd purchased from a man whose chemistry degree had actually paid for itself and all interest accrued. But, as profitable as it was, he'd thrown it all away in order to escape the criminal underworld while he still could, and having gotten the bloodsucking parasite that was the Navient corporation off of his ass, he'd been looking to liquidate his assets to anyone who was willing to take them.

"The new stuff is _shit_" he'd explained. "They don't make 'em with the right glass no more, so even the slightest thermal gradient will break that crap. No, this right here is the _good_ kind of Pyrex. It won't _explode_ on ya'." Far from cooking meth, however, Nick was merely setting some water to boil. Sighing, his head hanging in shame, he waddled over to a minifridge, bent over, and swung the door open and out of the way. Reaching into its frosty depths, he pulled out a glass jar full of testosterone, a syringe, and a shoelace. Indeed, Nicholas Wilde _had_ been to prison, and while he was there he had..._misplaced_...several things. Although he had been released years ago, be it the park he ran or his binightly date with the needle, it seemed that Nicholas Wilde was and would remain convicted and condemned to struggle, over and over, jumping day in and day out for grapes he could never hope to reach even to the day that he died. Oh well, if he couldn't have kids of his own, he could at least try to make other people's children happy.

Pulling back his sleeve, he deftly tightened the shoelace, and reached for the syringe. Taking in a deep breath like he'd done this a thousand times before, knew all too well how much it hurt (the physical sting inconsequential compared to the continual bruising of what remained of his dignity), and yet was utterly incapable of sparing himself this pain, he plunged the needle into a vein, a single tear rolling down his face as the clear fluid disappeared into his emasculated flesh. Its horrid work done, Nick set the needle down on the table, clamped his fists around his muzzle, and screamed, collapsing on the floor in a fit of hysterics as a white-lightning chill seeped through his vascular system.

Meanwhile, deep underground, in an immense cavern of light and sound, a little girl could hardly contain herself as she ran around, shrieking in joy.

The sound of laughter, echoing through his office as it did through the halls of Site 19, snapped Nick out of his trance. Alongside the CCTV gear and the fridge of shame, Nick's office also featured a very special piece of telecom equipment, one of several that took a phone call, scrambled the voice, and bounced it around the network to such an extent that it was virtually impossible to trace. Surprisingly useful for, among other things, ordering catering. Several minutes later, having dragged himself off the floor, he'd wiped the tears, and was doing exactly that. He held the handset to his ear, as he heard the all too familiar humming/beeping sound that indicated a ringing phone on the other end.

...

"Hey, I know it's last minute, but do you, by chance, have any cakes lying around? It's for a birthday."

...

"With real sugar, please."

...

"Yes, as soon as you can."

...

"Thank, you, thank you very much."

...

"Jasmine. J-A-S-M-I-N-E."

...

Nick flipped through a notepad, finding an address he hadn't used in a while. "26 Cruz street, Apartment number 203E."

Nick, who wasn't dumb enough to give the caterers his real address, had hung up, and was already reaching for a walkie talkie.

"Jorge, you there?"

"Ja."

"Need you to pick up some catering from dropoff point 13."

"Sí señor. Regresaré a pronto."

Having dealt with this matter, Nick turned his attention back to the syringe. By now, the centimeter or so of water in the beaker was at a rolling boil. Nick set the hot plate to low, and proceeded to detach the needle and discard it into the beaker, where it came to rest aside several others, a single drop of his own blood dissolving into the water and thinning away into nothing in seconds. Needles were not only expensive, but the simple act of acquiring them meant doing business with people a whole order of magnitude shadier than either himself or the "chemist", and when you literally kept your manhood bottled up in a fridge, you went through a lot of them. Thus, Nick did his needles the way most people did their laundry.

Meanwhile, Finnick and his daughter were passing the time on a see saw. Up and down she went, eyes shut tight as she savored the moment, entirely oblivious to the maelstrom of tragedy that was already transpiring around her.

* * *

Modifications had been made, they'd reviewed the procedure, and Fox, this time wearing a full pressure suit, was now standing in a rather large bomb bay, the paraglider suspended over the doors from a pair of pylons. If it weren't for the unoffensive light grey of whatever kind of space-age eldritch putty they'd made the suit from, Fox would've looked like some sort of mechanical demon, what with the dark glass, polished metal, and grey plastics covering his entire head. Even his ears were shielded, and rightfully so, considering how cold it could get up here. Meanwhile, beneath the suit, a sensor array was monitoring his vitals like prison guards, as a master computer slavishly filed their reports into a memory bank. Every breath he took, every word he said, every heartbeat, all were being recorded. So too were the sights and sounds of the world outside, for his suit was covered in cameras, the lenses lending Fox the appearance of a spider, or perhaps that of a cyberpunk reimagining of one of the many eyed wraiths from the final chapter of the book that everyone said was good, yet few bothered to read, preferring instead to cherrypick verses which suited their own pet ideologies and ignore the rest.

No, even now Fox did not seem an _Ophanim_ proper, for his form, stepping across a rickety catwalk and descending into his paraglider, was still far too humanoid to be a creature from John's Revelation. In that suit, his motions a tad stilted, his appearance was now more that of an inquisitive robot than a nested-wheel angel, his head revolving back and forth like that of an owl, as his field of view was ever so slightly constrained. In a way, even though he had yet to step through the portal, Fox McCloud already felt alone, distanced from the world by a wearable spacesuit that would have him casually strolling the rolling plasma hills of solar or the icy dunes of Fortuna without even noticing, though only perhaps for a few minutes. No, Fox did not have to wear the suit for his entire mission, but as he'd be appearing well above the so-called "death zone" where there was not enough oxygen in the air to sustain his metabolism indefinitely, some sort of oxygen delivery apparatus would be necessary upon arrival, and the suit would certainly come in handy if he arrived in a desert, or over Otierro's south pole in the dead of winter.

Fox McCloud, the curious robot covered in electronic eyes, sat in the drop pod, looking around the bomb bay and chucking at the absurdity of using this particular aircraft to haul something this inconsequential.

"Wow" he said into the mic. "May I ask why you guys have B-52 bomber on standby?" Feldman chose not to interpret Fox's statement as the implicit question that it was, and instead answered the question that had literally been asked.

"You may."

"What?"

"You requested to ask a question. Ask away."

"Uh, why do you guys have a B-52 on standby, and is that a thermonuclear warhead I see behind me?"

"Need to know basis, McCloud."

"Figured as much." He fastened the harness. "This is Fox, I am in position."

The doors cracked open, as the angelic screeching of 8 Pratt and Whitney J57-P-1W axial flow turbojets flooded the bomb bay in an instant, the muffled turbomachinery chior as much music to his own ears as to those of his great grandfather, who'd flown such ancient birds during the war. "It really is amazing, Fox-" He'd said. "-how _paranoid_ everyone was. It's a miracle any of us survived that damn war."

Fox glared at a big, glowing, red button marked "EJECT" and shook his finger. _Not this time._, he thought.

"Deploying in 3, 2, 1-"

The paraglider plunged like a rock. Fox was not in free fall, for the metal thing into which he was strapped would soon be falling faster than his own terminal velocity, and it almost felt like he was being dragged down with it. And, given how thin the air was up here, he was being dragged down alarmingly fast.

"Drogue chute deploy."

Fox was now in a tug of war amidst gravity and drag, the chute tumbling slightly in the air as the pod began to slow. See, there was a maximum safe speed at which the main parachute could be deployed. Any faster, and he'd risk tearing it to shreds. Then, he'd have to eject. Then, he'd lose the auxiliary payload, and all the experiments, supplies, and weapons it contained. It was for this reason that the big metal box with the glowing flat plasma ball looking thing on the front was stitched and double stitched to his pressure suit. Indeed, it and Fox himself were arguably the only pieces of mission critical hardware in the entire set up. As Feldman had said, they needed a man on the ground, and if, for whatever reason, that man was separated from the paraglider, he had to be able to come back from Sector _i_.

Fox was eyeing his airspeed indicator like a hawk: It was dropping, as was its derivative, as the aircraft's velocity approached equilibrium. A red line was stenciled on the gauge, and the needle had uneventfully passed it.

"Main chute deploy."

The paraglider began to right itself, the B-52 above now little more than a distant smudge in the sky that was growing smaller by the second. The bullet shaped thing was now falling unnaturally sideways, and at the push of a button, the twin folding arms deployed, their props now lifelessly twirling the Cornerian stratosphere, limp like a passed out fighter cadet in the centrifuge. Reaching down, Fox located the ripcord for the main engine, and pulled. From behind his mask he watched the gloved hand clench, yanking the handle with an impossibly fast lethargy.

_Nothing_.

He pulled again, moreso feeling the engine coming to life behind him than hearing its racket all around him. Indeed, until now he'd been falling, then gliding in the silence afforded him by his mask.

"Main engine operational."

Had he bothered to look, he would've noted that the props were no longer pinwheeling in the wind. Current flowed through them now, having roused the motors from their sleep. Now they were standing at attention, waiting for the command that would set them spinning. Fox gripped the throttle, nudging it forward as the brushless motors whirred into action. His target was some distance away, and this was going to be a long(er) flight.

A considerable time later, he'd landed right on target, again, having taken the time to perform what, for a paraglider, counted as several acrobatic stunts along the way. By the time he made it down, it was clear that Fox knew how to fly the thing, arguably as well as the people who'd slapped it all together in a hangar somewhere. He stood aside his craft, mask tucked beneath his arm like he were posing for the propaganda reels, grinning in anticipation. They'd gone over most of the experiments, and as this training mission had gone off without a hitch, there wasn't much left now between him and the wild blue yonder of Sector _i_.

* * *

Author's note: Yes, the third person omniscient narrator _can_ in fact have a Freudian slip. As for that blurb about student debt and Navient, well, half the fun of writing a dystopian hellscape is criticizing your own society in the same keystroke, and considering that they and their predatory business practices are literally being sued on the state and federal level for scamming students, it seems fitting to have them line their pockets with drug money.

*Also, **_fuck_** Madame Bovary. That book was awful.


	6. Different, all the same

"Deploy in 3, 2, 1-"

Transformers buzzed, relays clicked, capacitors discharged, and the induction motors heaved with a humming, whining sound that was decidedly out of this world, sending the sled, as it was called, flying down the track on a one way trip to sector _i_. 47 meters later, it was doing well over 110 kilometers per hour, and was still accelerating. With a subdued, aerodynamic hushing sound, the sled was brought to a halt by a set of aluminum fins that interacted with the magnets on the sled to produce eddy currents strong enough to power a suburban neighborhood, if only for a few seconds. The payload, meanwhile, was not in any way securely fastened to the sled, and flew through the cavernous concrete cathedral that was SCP-5562-a's containment chamber. It coasted straight towards the shimmering, shiny, pearlescent wormhole aperture, never to be seen again as it vanished into the tiny speck, itself floating in the center of an enormous void punctuated on all sides with some of the brightest floodlights Fox had ever seen. The launcher's echoes lingered as if they were ghosts, falling uselessly upon foam cones in the ears of the guards stationed on a balcony as they, a half dozen sentry turrets, and enough cameras to asphyxiate a dugong, all monitored the chamber.

This wasn't the first time Fox had set eyes on the launcher, itself an overbuilt metal monstrosity seated in a tunnel big enough for a four lane highway, but Fox McCloud still couldn't help himself from gawking like a child on his first day at an amusement park. Indeed, the whole thing was awfully reminiscent of _Flight of Fear_ (a childhood favorite of McCloud's) and it even looked like some sort of demented rollercoaster.

"Ah-" said Dr. Feldman, papers in hand "-I figured I'd find you here."

He handed a sheet to Fox. "We've got some more data in, and we've made a few minor changes to the mission plan, as you can see here."

Fox gestured to the launcher. "Hey, not that it isn't fun, but could you tell again why _any_ of this is necessary?"

"Need to know basis, McCloud."

"As the guy going through the wormhole, I of all people need to know."

"_Wisely done._" Dr. Feldman was proud, for his latest student was learning quickly. "One of the many quirks of this thing is that it gets quite hot in that wormhole."

"How hot?"

"Very hot."

"Solar hot?" Fox was one of the only people on this world who truly understood what that comparison meant.

"_Hotter_." Feldman replied, as if he was boasting. "We gotta' get you through fast, or not at all."

"Wait, then how the hell is that little thing on my chest going to get me back here in one piece?"

"Well for some reason, it's really _cold_ on the trip back. Why else would we send you over in that ridiculous suit?"

Fox was taken aback. "Never mind sector _i_, you don't even understand this thing, do you?" he said, pointing to SCP-5562-a, floating as always within its chamber.

Feldman paused, if only for a moment, to contemplate. "You remember that first briefing, right?"

"Yeah, what about it?"

"Well, do you know why everyone was so _desperate_ to prove themselves as quote-enquote 'real scientists', Fox? Because we don't do Science here. The people at Space Dynamics are capital-E Engineers doing capital-S _Science_. Compared to them, we're just banging rocks together here, except our rocks are anomalous."

"You guys keep saying that word. _'Anomalous'_."

"Name any law of science, logic, or even _theology_, and I will point you to an exception that we keep in the basement."

Fox chuckled. "_Theology?_"

"Tell me Fox, what does it mean to be omnipotent?"

"...Idunno, being all powerful, I guess."

"Sorry, but those are synonyms. Your definition is circular."

"How? 'all powerful' means you can do whatever you want."

"Ah! Much better, a proper working definition. So, can such a being exist?"

In the wake of the Lylatt Wars, Fox had been somewhat of a cynic, albeit an optimistic one. That had all changed, however, during the Sauria incident, in which he had literally rescued the woman who was now his wife like a fairytale knight in shining armor. Now, Fox, a man who had been personally possessed by multiple Krazoa Spirits, was far less skeptical of these things than most.

"Why not?" said Fox.

"Well suppose an omnipotent being wants to create another omnipotent being. An omnipotent being isn't some patently illogical thing like a square circle, and it can do whatever it wants, so it happens."

"OK, sure, now there are two of them."

"Well suppose they disagree about something. What if one of them wants to paint the house a sensible beige and the other some sort of flamboyant turquoise?"

Fox McCloud's house was well within that nebulous "robin's egg" sort of color between #0CC6A4 and #15B2D3. "Hey, you dissing my house?"

"You're dodging the question! What happens when the wills of two omnipotent beings contradict each other? It's like the unstoppable force meeting an immovable object: One of those descriptions is and _must_ be false. Since omnipotence, as we have defined it, entails a contradiction, it cannot exist. People were talking about this centuries ago, and the logic hasn't changed: Omnipotence, as it is widely understood, is impossible."

"And let me guess-"

Feldman interrupted McCloud by retrieving an orange slip of paper from his pocket. It was a "get out of jail free" card, but the Monopoly man was replaced by a distorted image depicting [REDACTED] violently consuming some lasagna.

"Here, for homework tonight I want you to hand this to the librarian, and ask to see the file on SCP-343. As a matter of fact, we _do_ have one in the basement."

Fox gazed upon the card and was left to consider the disturbing implications of what he'd just heard.

"OK, look, nevermind all that _God_ stuff; My point is that as far as the laws of science are concerned, whether it be the fact that the wormhole would emit enough gamma rays to sterilize a continent, or that the quantities of requisite antimass involved would cancel out Corneria itself, or that the energy output of our civilization during the entire 20th century, lumped together, would be insufficient to pry open the hole in the first place, or even the _astronomical_ differences in inertial reference frames that ought to render you little more than a crater on Otierro's surface, this whole endeavor, _literally_ everything you see here, is not merely impractical or improbable, but ought to be downright impossible for every reason you could think of _and then some!_"

"And yet I'm set to ride that thing tomorrow." Fox, who was finding himself increasingly fascinated with the eldritch cat on his card, was starting to get it.

"_Exactly_. Reality tends to play by the rules, but sometimes they get broken. That's all an anomaly is, a broken rule, and when they happen it's our job to deal with them. It is no coincidence that this is a Foundation undertaking, Fox, because frankly this is the only place in the world where a clueless intern can spill green jelly on a corpse."

"Um, what?"

"Well, that appears to be how we created the wormhole in the first place! Some poor soul was doing _god knows what_ with it, that something went horribly wrong, and the power cut out moments later. When we got the lights back on, we found that thing, sitting in what used to be a normal hallway."

"Is _that_ why this place is such a labyrinth?"

"Pretty much. We've yet to find a way to move SCP-5562-a, and we ended up just building the chamber around it.

"Well that doesn't sound so bad."

"It's been there for 2 years, we still don't know how to close it, and _it's growing_."

"_Oh_. Hey, by the way-" he said "-when I go, tomorrow, uh, I'd like to bring a gun, if that's alright with you guys."

"Go right ahead."

"..." The former mercenary was at a loss for words, and glanced back at the card.

"Something wrong, Fox?"

"It's just, idunno, shouldn't you be saying 'This mission is about_ saving_ the planet, not blowing it up!' or something?"

"_As if._ We sent over a watermelon as a test payload, not too long ago. Right about the time it came back with a bite taken out of it, we realized that a weapon was a pretty reasonable inclusion in your equipment manifest." Feldman gestured to the paper in Fox's hands, specifically to an annotated diagram of his paramotor drop pod. "Says so on the updated list: 1x Winchester plasma rifle, stowed right here next to the cardinal grammeter in the cargo bay."

"Uh, thanks, but I was thinking something more like-"

"A blaster? Your flightsuit's got a utility belt, after all. So long as it's got a clip on holster and it fits in the cockpit, it's fine by me."

"Would I be wrong to presume that this place has an armory?"

Dr. Feldman chuckled. "_We have several._"

"Alright then...Also, what the hell is "I̮̫̘͉̥ͅ'̸̸̡͍̠̭m͎̮ ͕s̵̻̜̳͍̻͖͖̦̻͢o͏̷̸̱̭ͅr͏̺̹̻͓͖̖͚r̢̢͎͡ͅy͓̯̳̺̩̞̼͟ ͙̺͈̙͢͡J̤͉̪̣̜͚̺͟o̤̘͍̥͟n҉̜̖͞"' supposed to mean?" Fox was now _very_ distracted by the orange slip of paper.

"Oh, that's a class 2 visual cognitohazard, by the way. Don't look at it too long or you will literally go insane."

* * *

The small blue fingertips caressed the plastic, skimming atop the cylinder as they came to the ridges. Three of them, there were, all counted one by one and pressure mapped in detail.

_flip_

A hollow tube protruded from a concave shell with a truncated end, all this he saw without seeing.  
Dr. Jordan Ridgeford reached for the sheet of parts, the molded plastic still attached to its stems. "Bullshit!" His father had said "They're selling you a toy that isn't even put together." Alas, for Marcus, that was easily half of the fun, although at this age, "fun" and "novel sensory input" were still synonymous at least some of the time. Nevertheless, there was nothing quite as much fun for him as dismantling and reassembling complex things, both in the multitude of the parts, and in the harmony they exhibited when the machine operated.

Marcus and Dr. Ridgeford had been assembling a _see through_ model of a 4-cylinder internal combustion engine, and right now, they were preparing the pistons. Notably absent was Dr. M, who, in spite of being in charge of Site 19's program of residency for the psionically gifted, had never really interacted much, at all, with Marcus, the latter referring to Dr. M as a 'bad man'.

Dr. Ridgeford pulled, bending the plastic to well past its breaking point, separating the half of the piston from the rest of the parts. Although Marcus wasn't yet strong enough to do this, he was more than able to levitate the parts, which he was currently doing, sending one over to a small but growing pile of grey plastic shapes.

"Marcus" Ridgeford chuckled "we can't assemble the piston if you keep putting the parts over there."

Glancing through the doctor's eyes, he giggled as he gazed upon the mountain he'd made.

The doctor grabbed a small U-shaped part that, in a real engine, would hold the bearing that transferred torque from a connecting rod to the crankshaft, although he was plonking it about as if it were a toy soldier. He conjured an image of an athlete in a spandex leotard with a pole in his hand, vaulting over Everest, and sent it to Marcus. Dr. Jordan Ridgeford was highly teleempathic, and was more than capable of both reading from _and_ writing to minds. Although there were a few things about this facility that alarmed Krystal, she most certainly agreed that psychic kids had to be raised by psychic adults, lest the misunderstood child with scary mind powers grow up to be an emotionally unstable time-bomb, shambling about as a bipedal approximation of a normal person before snapping one day, rampaging through a neighborhood and killing over a dozen people in the process, as Mitchell Henderson had done all those years ago.

He too had been a bad man.

"Hey Marcus, what can jump higher than a mountain?" As he said this, Ridgeford mimed the jumping action in the image he'd sent with the piece he was holding, clearing Marcus' plastic pile in a single leap.

Marcus brought his left hand to his mouth. Not _in_ his mouth, no, his lips remained sealed, but nevertheless his clenched hand was very near it. Dr. Ridgeford could almost swear he was seeing the gears turn in the little fox's head.

"I don't know."

"_Nothing._ Mountains don't jump!"

A slight crease perturbed his cerulean brow, the sign of major contemplation and computation. Several seconds later, it faded, a smile beginning to spread.

The child giggled. In time, Marcus would cherish this memory, for all the wrong reasons.

A squirming tightness bolted from the young McCloud's chest into his head. From there, it arced through the air and struck Dr. Ridgeford as a clenching in the small of his back. The doctor sighed, knowing it was fruitless to complain.

"When you gotta' go-" he mused. Reaching his decidedly non cerulean blue hand to Marcus. "-you gotta' go. Come on, up!"

So they left the impromptu toy room for a pee break.

* * *

Speaking of which, as he came for a landing, taking a much needed piss was the one thing on Fox's mind. Although less than enormous bladders had been a sort of McCloud family curse for generations, it had ultimately been Falco who'd convinced Slippy that it was a worthwhile endeavor to, at the very least, install a tube in the cockpits of their Arwings. They'd just gotten in from a mission, and were only halfway out of their flightsuits when they were forced to scramble again to fend off a group of homing missiles in Sector Z. By the time _that_ was all over, Falco's morning coffee had had more than enough time to percolate through his system and pool, pool, and pool some more before finally bursting through his sphincter like the South Fork Dam. Indeed, the cockpit was soaked to such a degree that it might as well have been there during the 1889 Johnstown flood, and it took roughly as much water to get all the piss out of the upholstery.

Fox had been just fine as he'd suited up, utility belt and all. They'd hurled him into the wormhole without incident, Fox plunging from a white void to another, this second void inky and pitch black. His parachutes had deployed, and some time later a whole new sky full of stars faded into view as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The planet below was as different as the sky above, but unfortunately, Fox had spawned on the night side and couldn't see _any_ of it, aside from this planet's improbably large moon, and the luminous white sliver that dominated the sky.

"_Damn_" he said into the mic, more for posterity than as any sort of "I made it" message. The wormhole was all but opaque to radio waves, so Feldman and his buddies wouldn't have the slightest idea what had happened to him until well after he returned. In the mean time, he had the computer in his suit to keep him company, as it recorded _everything_ he saw or heard.

"Sorry fellas, it's night here. Ain't nothing much to see.

Fortunately, the anomalous materials people had foreseen precisely this scenario, and had installed a ground radar and a very powerful set of landing lights onto the paramotor, although they wouldn't be of much use to him until Fox got considerably closer to the surface. So he coasted almost blindly, adrift in the void for hours before a number appeared on his instrument panel. According to the radar, he was now about 2 kilometers above Otierro's surface. By this point, the air had grown cool and awfully quiet, and Fox, like any good pilot, checked a pressure based flight altimeter to corroborate the radar. Fortunately, one of the many experiments performed by a prior probe had been a measurement of air pressure at ground level, and thus, Fox could be reasonably sure that the radar wasn't full of shit, although they didn't quite know _exactly_ what a reading of 96.1 kilopascals actually meant here.

"Activating the lights in 3, 2, 1-"

Fox toggled the switch, and saw nothing.

"Again, nothing to see here. 4 hours 39 minutes have elapsed since launch." This last bit was redundant, since the recorder kept meticulous timestamps down to the millisecond.

Fox turned the lights back off. Not that he really needed to: Fox was still gliding, and 18.6 kilowatt motor put out more than enough power to run the 1900 watt radar, and the 600 watt lights, and maintain level flight at the same time, although it was noticeably more sluggish when it was powering both than it had been during the training missions.

"Radar reads 1.5 kilometers. Activating lights in 3, 2, 1-"

Still nothing. Then Fox thought to pitch the nose down a bit. After all, even with the brightest Maglite in the world, you won't see _jack shit_ if it's is pointed in the wrong direction.

"Hm, maybe I should try pitching- HOLY SHIT!"

It seemed to Fox like he were a mote of dust, suspended in front of an immense orange wave. It took him several seconds to realize that he was looking at sand dunes, and as he got closer, their true scale astounded him. These things were easily 120 meters tall, their vantablack silhouettes bumping along from horizon to horizon.

"It seems I've come in over a desert. Perhaps it's for the best I showed up at night, I mean MacBeth was hot as hell during the day, and I doubt it's different here."

Some time later, a technician in a basement was fast forwarding through the data tapes, when the sudden appearance of the Otierran dunes startled her into releasing the button. By this point, fast-forwarding and all, quite a few seconds had passed since Fox noticed the dunes.

"Come on, Fox, it's just a few more minutes...don't pull a Shepherd _now_...Maybe that big one back there wasn't such a bad place to land."

And now he was here, having landed on "that big one", a particularly noteworthy dune that towered 169 meters over the surrounding desert. He took a breath, then another, then a third, the slightly chilled sterility of the compressed air tricking through his nose as he slowly reached for his mask. He was almost overwhelmed by a purely cerebral wonder: Dunes, stars, air, Feldman was right: It really _was_ the same here. If it weren't for the altered states of a handful of neurons deep in his frontal cortex, neurons whose states correlated to the knowledge that Fox was on another world, it wouldn't have been different at all (except for the moon).

Yet it was, for that one switch thrown, the lone bit in his brain, made all the difference in the worlds.

Fox was now in an emotional landscape that few outside of academia ever truly bothered to explore. For many, emotions dictated cognition, thus the petty boss refuses to admit they're wrong. Here, however, just as it had been with the insignificant speck suspended in a lens flare like a microscopic insect, brought to attention for only a moment by a brilliant man who had decided, _as an afterthought_, to temporarily distract a probe from its experiments with an atavistic longing for a world to which it would never return, it was the cognizant mind, the rational, the voiced, the thought that gave orders to the feeling.

"Consider again that pale blue dot," he had asked, in doing so showing Corneria for what it was: a cluster of 4 pink pixels, suspended in an infinite void. For those who knew what it depicted, it was an image bearing an utterly Lovecraftian power, but alas, it had not the power to save Corneria, the fickle dot, like static on a TV screen, from itself. Biological weapon experiments today, near extinction tomorrow.

"The air probably isn't toxic-" Feldman had said. But what did that mean? What was "probably"? 90% sure? 99%? 99.9%? And whatever the figure really was, was Fox willing to bet on it?

"The air probably isn't toxic-" Fox said, pausing to contemplate. He clenched and pulled, splitting the helmet at the seams with a soft hiss. Nudging the mask off his face, swinging upwards like a clamshell opening, he lifted it off his head, set it down beside him in the cockpit, and gasped. The acridity, the dryness, the subdued _heat_ of the breeze struck him instantly, stranger molecules winding through his fur and tickling his face, the thin veil separating him from this place and the lone pocket of his universe in which he had resided bursting in an instant.

"-Probably." Said Fox, who now had other, more physiological worries to contend with. He undid the buckles on his suit and pulled down on the zipper, wriggling from and shedding the pressuresuit as it if were the skin of a snake. Fox, relatively naked now in tank top and shorts, was finally free to _be_ here in the desert, and his first order of business involved opening a valve and shutting off the bottled oxygen. Here he was, his aircraft finally resting on alien soil, although he was far too preoccupied with pissing into a funnel to care. He sat in the stifling desert void, alone amidst the crescent dunes, the tinkling sound between his legs the only reminder that he really _was_ anywhere at all, rather than nowhere and everywhere at once beneath this moon. And, now that he was no longer flying anything, he had nothing better to do but stare at it as he pissed into the night. Of course, the pictures they'd already taken of it were arguably as good as any sort of view McCloud could get from the surface, but it just wasn't the same, you know? Seeing it on a screen never truly is.

Having tucked everything away, Fox reached for what the egg-heads called the portable data recorder, activating it and its black box as he did so. It was really just an overbuilt camcorder with a bunch of science-y shit duct-taped to it, but it did the job. Speaking of the moon, Fox was screwing a telephoto lens onto the recorder as he prepared to photograph the distant satellite.

"Time elapsed is...HA! What do you know, it's been damn near 5 hours flat since launch! Anyway, as I'm sure you all can see, uh, it's still night. Since there isn't much else to photograph yet, might as well snap a pic or two of that moon."

So Fox did, or at least he tried, leaning back in his seat as the enigmatic moon came into view, taking the form of a white clawmark on the viewfinder. As he zoomed in and dialed down the exposure, he became all too aware of the subtle quivering of his own flesh. He snapped a few photos anyway, but they were all a bit blurry in one way or another.

"Hmm. Guess I'll need a tripod."

Turning in the seat, Fox reached behind him, propping up a metal pole brimming with lights, as if there were such a thing as a disco-searchlight, built to cast light in all directions. It hurt to look at directly, and it made the part of the paramotor's hull nearest to it glow like a white sidewalk on a midsummer sunny day, as viewed without shades. The light spilled out, echoing from sands for at least 50 meters in all directions, the drop pod's motor now chugging away once again.

Having activated the lights, the mysterious spaceman placed the parrot on his neck and descended the ladder, leaving his chair for the sands beyond. The parrot, a device in the approximate shape of a horseshoe, was designed to record peripheral video in the event that Fox saw fit to remove his pressuresuit. In other words, if it entered McCloud's field of view for even a second, the researchers would see it too.

Not that there was much to see, night and all, but still he bore it, if only to avoid getting chewed out upon his return.

Reaching the bottom of the ladder, Fox looked down and planted his boot into the sand excitedly, only to realize moments later that it was sand, and that his footprints would never last. Even as he lifted his boot, the impression left by its tread collapsed in on itself, softening out into a vague oblong crater that would soon be erased by the literal sands of time. Fox stepped over to the cargo hatch, undid the latch, and swung the door downwards and out, revealing quite a few implements that would probably be useless here, and a number of devices that would soon make themselves very useful indeed. He also noticed a high end plasma rifle, right where Dr. Feldman said it would be.

"First order of business, the tripod." He reached in and grabbed it, turning on the spot and striding cartoonishly, almost _marching_ off towards who knows where.

Fox got as far as sticking the tripod into the sand before he noticed the moving lights on the horizon. He'd forgotten the tripod now, and was scrambling to get it on tape.

"There's, there's a light! Holy crap there's a light! Right there!" He said, as he shifted his attention to the portable data recorder. But from this distance, in his hands, any footage obtained was a jittery mess.

"Ah shoot! Gotta' set this up fast!"

As much as he tried, the speck had grown quite dim by the time the tripod was ready. He got a few seconds of decent footage before it vanished abruptly.

"Saw it here first, ladies and gentlemen. As far as I'm concerned, this place _is_ inhabited, although I have evidently landed in the middle of nowhere."

Fox pointed the data recorder back at his parawing, clipped a mic to his tank top, and walked back to his 'ship', retrieving and positioning a pair of worklights such that he would soon be casting a trio of shadows. Returning to the paramotor, he plugged a pair of wires into the switchboard, and brought more light to the night time. He had been instructed to perform or set up most of his experiments on camera, and to this end they had included the lighting needed to ensure that such activity could be seen at any hour.

"Alright, let's see...what's next?" said Fox, checking the list. It was annoyingly long. 2 hours later, sextant readings had been taken, weather vanes were now in place, and a pair of silver boxes sat on the closest thing to hard ground there was on this dune: a gyroscope and a seismometer listening for the planet's rotation and earthquakes, respectively. Shovels full of surface samples had been taken, petri dishes had been swabbed, and Fox was now thoroughly tired.

This was just as well, since if there was nothing else to do, the mission plan called for him to wait for several hours, and Fox decided to attempt to fall asleep. Checking the gauges, he saw that what was left of the auxiliary power unit's fuel would last more than long enough, and so he laboriously climbed back into his suit, activating the thermostat (God knows how hot this place would get during the day), plugging in the umbilical charging cable, and setting the alarm as he plopped down into the pilot's seat, leaving his mask at his feet.

Nothing had changed. Night still seemed night, the lights and cameras remained unmoved, and the experiments continued to work stationarily, like mysterious obelisks, doing something and nothing all at once. The only clue that hours had passed were the fuel gauge, the clocks, and the moon, which was now much closer to the horizon. On closer inspection, the horizon itself seemed just slightly lighter in value than it had been upon his arrival, perhaps it was the sunrise coming? _Surely_ this night had to end eventually?

Alas, the mission was far from over, even as he set out to pack up his equipment and return to the chamber from whence he came.


	7. Spillover

**Well, this _is_ a Star Fox/Zootopia crossover, and I think it's high time they, you know crossed over.**

**So without any further adieu, here's chapter 7. ****Thank you very much for reading, review are appreciated.**

_**Enjoy.**_

* * *

Stifling deserts.

Dense rainforests.

A raging typhoon.

Frigid salty sludge patrolled by iceberg navies.

Fox had seen all these and more during his voyages to Otierro. But he'd yet to actually see anyone.

Not that they weren't trying. Among his numerous other chores, Fox had been instructed to attempt to locate many of the brighter stars in the nighttime sky, and, as the visits piled on, the researchers began to suspect that the placement of the arrival point wasn't quite as arbitrary as they'd suspected.

This time, they had a model. This time, they put forth predictions. This time, they made adjustments. This time, with any luck, Fox would actually meet one of them.

"Put your best diplomatic face on, Fox, because this time we're aiming for the biggest city on their map."

Feldman hadn't felt this _giddy_ in a long time, their expectations ripping the humdrum routine of launch and return to pieces and tossing it into the nearest Blendtec total blender, where upon a jolly man in safety specs would grind it to tiny bits and smile for the cameras.

"Routine smoke, don't breathe this!" he'd say, while the horns blared.

So too, with similar fanfare, did the launcher, well, _launch_, the linear induction motors propelling Fox McCloud into the void at 194.7 kilometers per hour! Never mind mere similarity, this was _exactly_ like riding Flight of Fear.

But what lay in wait for him, nobody could truly say, and he could not see, for Fox's eyes were tightly shut against the blinding white of the void between worlds. As the falling sensation surrounded him, he suspected he'd opened his eyes too soon, only to realize that, for once, he'd arrived at high noon, or something close to it. Having done this several times by now, he felt little urgency to deploy the drogue chute, and took the requisite second or two to look around.

And there it was, in the plains below: Shimmering glass, twisting spires, metal monoliths and countless acres of concrete. It was a city, alright. A real city, sprawling like a bacterial infection from one point, spreading to all it could touch. Barges, trains, highways, and even an airport, it looked like a diorama out of Fox's history textbooks:

"Corneria City before the war, c. 1999" Indeed, it almost looked like this. But the buildings in those photos were all rectangles, boxes, standing straight in fear of The Bomb, and the unholy bioweapons that Andross would go on to unleash in their wake.

Many a day in class Fox had stared at the photographs of the old world, wanting to step though and see what it was really like, back when _all_ the lights were on and there was _no_ rubble in the streets. Now, maybe he'd get his chance, for this wasn't a photo at all!: It was still here, it was still real, still alive, and maybe it would be better this time around. Maybe. Fox's great grandfather, the man who had flown in the B-52s to hell and back, probably would have felt at home in the faraway city. It sat on the edge of a great subtropical sea, a 360 meter white speck cleaving the prussian blue depths in two as it sailed from port, while behind it sat a truly spectacular mountain range.

Mountains that Fox had appeared right on top of.

"Oh shit!" He said, deploying the chute. Having snapped out of it, he took a second to catch his breath, and announced to the black boxes what he had encountered. "Well Feldman, your team hasn't _quite_ got the positioning right, but there it is! It's a real city!"

He leaned his head over the side, gazing down at the rocky crags below.

"And it's a good thing I spawned so high, because..._gee_ those mountains are _huge_."

As per Fox's suggestion, a sort of cruise control feature had been added to the paramotor, if for no other reason than to facilitate aerial data-gathering, and he activated it now, setting his paramotor into a gentle descent as he continued to approach the city. Now that his hands were free, he proceeded to screwed a telephoto lens onto the Portable Data Recorder so quickly it was almost rushed, and propped it against the hull of the drop pod. Amazingly, it was just barely stable enough for a decent shot, and Fox took the liberty of snapping more than a few, cranking up the shutter speed to hopefully keep any oscillation induced motion blur to a minimum. Indeed, so concerned with photography was he that Fox opted to fly a whole lap around the city, rather than head straight for it. Even when he'd spawned, it hadn't been anywhere near the horizon's edge, and Fox had more than enough range to survey the alien metropolis.

What should've been a red flag occurred as Fox neared the city, a loud _whoosh_ and a blur of transonic metal flying past his paraglider. Edgy lines, domed cockpit, recessed engines, afterburners, and a pair of conical protrusions (which were probably missiles) emerging from beneath the wing: by the look of things, it was a fighter aircraft of late 20th century design. Not that their tech necessarily progressed at a rate and in an order identical to the Cornerians, no, for a variety of reasons, this was astoundingly unlikely.

Nevertheless, it was some sort of fighter aircraft, simultaneously alien and futuristic compared to the paraglider, yet also utterly primitive in the eyes of the man who'd flown arwings through interplanetary space.

"Oh, probably intruding on their airspace." Fox said, gazing at the nearby airport as he steered away. "Whoopsie, where _are_ my manners? Well folks, I think they know I'm here."

* * *

It was 3 in the afternoon, and Judy was finishing up a patrol, her car stopped at the corner of a rather large and oddly quiet park. Wild Times had been raided less than a week ago, and _everyone_ had seen the pictures. Not of smiling children, of course, but of a "savage" fox: For over the last 6 days the propaganda reels had shown nothing _but_ Nicholas Wilde and his affiliated terrorists, bloodied, black-eyed, or otherwise beaten to a pulp and ensnared in those nooses on poles. Widespread public hysteria and all, the park was empty to the point of being outright deserted.

"Officer Hopps, come in, over." Bogo's voice sighed over the CB radio.

"Is it about that UFO?"

"I told you, Officer, it's not a prank."

"Yeah yeah, I know."

"It still hasn't responded to our calls, and it looks to be landing in Central Park."

"Dammit. I've already got a visual."

The paraglider wing fluttered and spun in a figure-8 like a kite, almost hovering, in a way, dangerously still in the sky as it inexorably descended, drifting towards the center of the field.

Judy raised her glock, a gun big enough to double as a dildo for an animal twice her size, and trained the metal pod in her ironsights, 41 hollow-point cartridges lying within the specially modified, police issue, ultra high capacity magazine, _itching_ at the chance to send some innocent predator straight to hell.

"Want me to shoot it down?" She asked, not quite in jest.

"No, just be sure to chew that bastard out _real_ good when he lands."

"Copy that." she grumbled, putting the gun away.

Meanwhile, it swooped down suddenly, leveling out and gliding but a hair over the heads of the people below, or so it seemed. The craft, now gliding, pulled up slightly, before resuming its shallow decent.

"You're not getting away from ME!"

The wing tilted, the pod below turning in an instant, as if it were being guided by a highly skilled pilot who simply wasn't taking this all that seriously.

Said pilot, of course, was trying to slow the glider for the landing, and thus Judy soon found herself catching up to it.

The glider went up sharply, turning like a rollercoaster, barely on the rails at it came down, now literally flying right over her head and touched down behind her.

"_HEY! GET BACK HERE!_"

Officer Hopps took off after the UFO again, screeching to a halt beside the metal capsule and the now deflated wing, which was lying on the ground as if it were impotent. All the while, the crowd which had previously cleared way now approached the mysterious visitor, _ooohing_ and _aaahing_ as crowds tend to do.

"Alright _mister_, I don't know what you thought you were doing, but it ends _**now**_."

The thing in the cockpit stared in bewilderment, although in the reflective visor of Fox's mask the only thing the officer saw was fear. "You speak Cornerian?"

Judy refused to admit to herself that she felt more than a bit intimidated as the weirdo in the spacesuit started to climb out from his capsule. I say "started", of course, because it just didn't seem to stop, on and on and on, higher and higher he stood without end in sight. The whole thing, be it the creepy mask with the soulless tinted glass apertures, or the arms and legs that were _a whole order of magnitude_ _too long_, all of it was just _wrong_, and it only got worse as she craned her head farther and farther back, the creature's head now blocking out the sun and casting her in its shadow. It was easily taller than 95% of Zootopians, and in stark contrast to the formerly quadrupedal creatures who'd magically started walking upright one day, this thing was a proper petting zoo person, with shoulders so broad they seemed more like a counter-top or a table than anything you'd expect to find on a living creature. Its forearms could give Bogo a run for his money at the precinct arm wrestling tournament, and _dear god_ its legs: Judy had never seen anything like them. They were thick, towering over her like a pair of tree trunks, capped in steel boots that thudded about like they were heavy enough to be her partner on a see-saw. This thing, this creature, this, this _invader_ may not have been an elephant, but one wrong step from either of those boots would leave her no less dead than if she had been personally sat on by Donald Trunk himself.

Whether or not she was terrified of this thing, she had a job to do.

"You're under arrest, asshole."

"Listen-" Fox said, reaching to take off his mask. This would prove to be a big mistake. "-I'm sorry about the airport, but I can explain-"

But Officer Hopps never heard the end of that sentence. Her brain froze upon seeing his face, as an icicle of dread crackled down her spine. These people weren't as paranoid as Corneria had been before the war. No, the city of Zootopia was _even worse_.

"This is Hopps, I've got a savage!" She was yelling into the mic so loud it was almost a scream, her voice audible to anyone and everyone within 30 meters. "Repeat, I've got a savage!" The crowd disbanded immediately, some of the younger ones screaming as they fled.

"A _what?_ Officer, I can explain-" Fox took exactly one step towards this rabbit.

"STAY BACK!" Her glock was drawn in an instant, and Fox flinched, quite noticeably.

"_STAY BACK!_" Fox took a _big_ step back, his sheer scale worrying Judy that much more.

"_**I SAID STAY BACK**_" Fox noticed that her hands quivered. Being held at gunpoint by someone scared halfway to death was hardly a good place to be, and Fox knew he had seconds (at most) to do something before that ditzy bunny pulled the trigger. So he bolted, only to be knocked to the ground by a sharp _thwack_ in his side.

He'd been shot.

Remembering the plan B strapped to the chest of his suit, he pressed the button mounted to his glove just as something grazed his shoulder. A shimmering sphere appeared around him, and Fox McCloud vanished into the wormhole aperture moments later. Judy, meanwhile, let out a guttural yell like a soldier charging into battle and ran into the sphere, shooting at it the entire time. The launch chamber rang with the cries of ricocheting bullets, and it was amidst this ringing that Fox McCloud fell onto the concrete floor, collapsing right next to the launcher in a growing pool of some warm fluid and blacking out moments later.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

**Spillover infection,** also known as **pathogen spillover** and **spillover event**, occurs when a reservoir population with a high pathogen prevalence comes into contact with a novel host population. The infection is transmitted from the reservoir population and may or may not be transmitted within the host population.


	8. Infection

Cold.

Very cold.

Like tumbling in a whiteout snowstorm, she fell.

* * *

"A VESSEL OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN HAS LANDED IN CENTRAL PARK."

A mammal was scurrying about in a white, papery quarantine suit.

"ALL CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY."

She waved a wand around and occasionally rubbed things with cotton swabs.

"STAY WHERE YOU ARE, KEEP YOUR WINDOWS CLOSED."

While the scientists one the ground frantically tested for germs, the bureaucrats were strutting about like beheaded chickens, dazed, confused, and utterly at a loss at what to do next.

"IF YOU MUST GO OUTSIDE, KEEP YOUR FACE COVERED AND YOUR MOUTH CLOSED."

Of course they didn't know what to do. This was, after all, a textbook black swam event: impossible to foresee, severe and irreversible consequences.

"LIMITING EXPOSURE MAY BE TANTAMOUNT TO ENSURING-"

The parachute deployed without complain.

"A SECOND VESSEL HAS BEEN DETECTED. THE DEFENSE CONDITION IS NOW AT ONE."

He had orders to land outside the city, to find someone, anyone, who he could talk to, to clear this up.

"ALL CIVILIANS ARE ORDERED TO EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY."

Not that he ever got that far.

"WE ARE AT WAR."

The backup pilot's paraglider was intercepted by 4 Lockheed Martin F-22 "raptor" fighter jets. The supercruising stealth fighters reached him in 139 seconds, and not only shot the relatively unarmed drop pod clean out of the sky, but went so far as to turn a mostly solid bullet shaped metal thing into something resembling a cheesegrater with a volley of burning red strontium-magnesium tracer rounds. He was dead before he hit the ground (At terminal velocity, no less).

* * *

As the mirrored wormhole aperture vanished around her, SCP-5562-C impacted a pile of a substance that was very similar to snow, although it wasn't very cold. Far from any sort of chill, it was a perfectly lukewarm 293.15 Kelvin. It wasn't exactly fluffy, either, and it wasn't even that much of a pile: It was more like a very thin layer of painfully dry pink dust particles, the sort that were simultaneously big enough to be gritty yet was also damn near microscopic, lightly scattered atop a concrete floor that had been thoroughly bleached not too long ago. In other words, it wasn't like snow in any way that didn't invoke a metaphysical comparison.

At first glance, it seemed she were back in Wild Times, on account of the clandestine undergroundness of Site 19, and the immense, nightmarish, rollercoaster-looking launcher thing. Then, like now, her first instinct was to shoot everything that moved and ask questions later, but it was as if something was very sternly advising her otherwise this time around. Perhaps it was the chamber itself, its 7.8 meter ceiling making her feel even smaller than she did in the precinct one ZPD station. Perhaps it was a silent voice in her head, coming from behind her. Whatever it may have been, she was up in an instant, running for the nearest door as the klaxons sounded.

Officer Hopps may have been fast, but they were faster: a trio of MTF personnel, faceless behind their mirrored visors and black Kevlar body armor, charged into the chamber and spotted her in an instant. Suddenly she was surrounded on all sides by thudding boots, staring down (or more accurately, _up_) the barrels of guns that were literally bigger than her.

Whatever sort of Ungodly Rage it was that had compelled Judy to charge into that portal had shriveled up and died, leaving her powerless to resist the pull of a foreign gravity as it inexorably pulled her own glock to the floor, clanging it against the concrete like some primate banging a bongo as she craned her head back and looked up. It really was quite disturbing, seeing giants move this quickly, yet that's exactly what they did, a proper barbershop quartet of masked candy-striper medics barreling past with a gurney and bloodbags in tow.

The sight of these beings, towering above the world so high as their boots came down like bombs in a war, was downright dizzying, and before she even knew what was happening, Officer Hopps was being escorted, _urgently_, through another concrete hall, whose ceilings were just as oppressively high as the ones in the previous chamber. The lights buzzed incessantly, the metal doors groaned in song, opening and shutting to accommodate an endless flood of these enormous bipeds: A pair of guards escorting a chain gang of canids in orange jumpsuits, a second gurney that was presumably transporting a corpse, A small team of researchers in labcoats, some carrying clipboards, others frantically hammering away at calculators the size of her head.

It was right about when an ashen lupine rounded the corner ahead of them that Judy realized exactly how _wrong_ this place was:

Predators! All of them! Be it the juvenile who had that characteristic _retard_ look to his face, his chaperone, or her own escorts, _everyone_ here was a predator. It wasn't just disproportionate, there were _no_ prey at all in this facility, and not only that, but they were all 6 feet tall (or so they seemed to the rabbit).

She tripped, fell, and was on the floor for but a moment before something grabbed her by the shoulders, her escort party resuming its journey as it came upon an elevator. A child's voice, speaking of a "bad man" could briefly be heard before the elevator commenced its decent, but she didn't bother to listen. Aside from the whirring of machinery, the elevator was silent.

"So, uh, how's the weather?"

Two of the MTF personnel were now facing each other, neither loosening their grip on their firearms.

"Idunno. Haven't been topside in 2 days."

"That's a fucking mood right there." Said the one behind her.

"Oh tell me about it."

"Here, once 5562...hey, what designation are we even on now?"

"No idea."

"Alright, well once 5562-dash-Lambda is secured, what do you say we apply for some R 'n R? Pretty sure we're all past due."

"I sure as hell could use a break."

"Count me in."

Judy coughed. Everyone was now awkwardly glaring at her.

"So, uh, once we're off, what're we going to do, anyway?"

"I was thinking minigolf."

"What is it with you and minigolf?"

"Have you ever seen Dr. Bright play?"

"_Oh dear God_."

"No really, it's fun to watch him fail."

They laughed.

Speaking of which, the doors opened to reveal-

Judy screamed. She'd never laid eyes upon a primate before, let alone a lizard man, and before she knew it she was running. Unable to quickly restrain her with their hands, the MTF settled for their tasers on the lowest setting.

It all but killed her.

In hindsight, compared to what was to come, death by taser, writhing on the floor in electric agony, would've been a relatively tidy (and ironic) way to end the sordid story that was the life of Officer Judith Laverne Hopps. Alas, that is not what happened.

He made sure of _that_.

* * *

The light fixture, a metaphorical beam from Heaven shining into this ungodly pit, swung ever so slightly, casting his face in mildly cognitohazardous shadows that induced seasickness if you gazed upon them for too long.

"It was a birthday party. A. GOD. DAMN. BIRTHDAY. PARTY. _We even had a a cake with real icing._ And what for? Maybe, just maybe, it was because we were naive enough to try and give a little girl a sprinkle's worth of fun in her life, to find something, _anything at all_, to make all these empty, _wasted_ years worth living, because they're not even miserable! Oh boy do I _wish_ I could say they were miserable! But no, you lot didn't even let us keep our sadness, didn't you? It just wasn't FUCKING ENOUGH WASN'T-"

What would likely have been a cathartic rant was cut off by a red light and a buzzing sound.

"And what about the girl? There she was, not even half a meter tall, just having a little fun, at her birthday party." He paused, only for a moment, to take a breath. "But now, instead of actually being able to _enjoy_ the icing on the cake, or anything that even comes close to passing for fun, little Jasmine gets to spend her 7th birthday learning what "orphan" means. And somehow, and here's the _real_ miracle folks, this not only _my_ fault, but I owe _you_ an explanation? You don't know _shit_ about what I've been through. You don't know how many hours of sleep I've lost, how long I've had to work, and sweat, and toil, and _cry_ to even get this dream off the-"

More buzzing, more red.

"And do you know _why_ I did it? 'Cuz I was _stoopid_ enough to think that there really _was_ some room for good in this, this _hellhole_. But I was wrong. I was stupid. S-T-U-P-I-D. They say no good deed goes unpunished, and right on cue there you were, shooting first and asking questions later. Oh, please _do_ pardon me, officer, because I have a question I've simply _got_ to ask: Just who do you think you're protecting here? Because mark my words, _Carrots_, there is a special place deep in the darkest bowels of Hell, and He's written your name _all_ over it!"

"_Wow._" Said the rabbit. "I'm not even offended. Hell, I'm actually _impressed!_ I mean, I've heard a lot of _dindu nuh'n's_ in my time, but that right there takes the cake. Seriously, how long were you rehearsing _that_ one in the mirror? Honestly, you could've been a half decent actor if you hadn't been such a mangy sonovabitch. But I'm not some _dumb bunny_, OK? That 'innocent fun' bullshit ain't gonna' fool me, 'cuz I can see right through your tricks, _fox_. Oh don't give me that look, I know about the dungeon y'all built, _oh yes I do_. Looks to me like they're gonna' have to _fix_ you and your little _pervert_ friends before they send you off to the Zoo."

Nick, however, had rubbed shoulders with a gender dysphoric psychopathic hippopotamus, the hippo having spent the last decade and a half drifting back and forth between underfunded insane asylums and prisons stuffed well past capacity, all the while learning how to hide dangerous or otherwise prohibited objects from the guards, including but not limited to: Muzzles, leashes, cell phones, small packets of surprisingly valuable detergent, coveted works of erotic fiction, and a veterinary emasulator, the latter she'd purchased from a rather bewildered thug who wanted nothing more to do with her or whatever she was planning on doing with it. Now, in spite of the sheer trauma sustained during his visit to the Hell on earth that was the Zoo, he couldn't help but attempt a chuckle. He was quite rudely interrupted, however, as Judy briefly reduced the indignant vulpine to a babbling, spastic pile of incoherent flesh at the push of a button, the poor fox chained to the table and jittering randomly in electric agony.

"I WASN'T FINISHED, ASSHOLE! Seriously, what is _wrong_ with you people? Are you physiologically incapable of taking something seriously for once? I've seen them send a thousand of you fleabags to the chair, and _not one_ of them could stop themselves from trying to crack a joke. Is that all this is to you foxes, a joke? Honestly I don't know why we even bother with you people, because _I swear_, it's never enough for you, isn't it? The sneaky deals, the cheering crowds, the _fame_, the _money_, no, you just had to have _more_, didn't you? Couldn't accept your place on the totem pole, so you think that gives you the right to knock the whole damn thing over, don't'cha? And whether or not that seditionist, _insubordinate_ mouth of yours will admit it, that _is_ what you were doing: You were playing with fire, teasing yourselves with those savage urges of yours, _one_ wrong move, and-"

"Do you really think this black piece of plastic is the _only_ thing keeping me from going nuts?"

"AS A MATTER OF _FACT_, I DO." The uppity rabbit cop thought she was being assertive. In reality, she was practically screaming, the fear...no, scratch that, the utterly paranoid _hysteria_ staining her voice like blood on a wedding dress, a Scarlet that seeped into every nook and cranny of her mind. "That little technological miracle, and the _equality_ that it finally leveraged, is the cornerstone, the _foundation_ of this city, and everything that we as a civilized society have managed to achieve _in spite_ of your primitive natures. Not that _you_ care. _You_ think it's a goddamn joke, you all do."

"And what did I ever do to you? _Huh?!_" The fox strained against the handcuffs.

Officer Hopps brandished her firearm: A comically large glock. "I, for one, have to carry a loaded pistol on patrol because of people like _you_."

"What's wrong? The pwecious wrabbit cop can't handle someone half her size?" He was, of course, referring to the untimely demise of his longtime partner in crime.

"Oh sure, _pretend_ to be innocent, go right ahead! But we both know what it was like when predators were in charge, and if _your kind_ had their way, this whole planet would be on fire! _The rest of us_, meanwhile, have lives to live, work to do, and _families_ to raise. You of all people should know, that is, assuming you ever actually gave a shit about the kids at all."

Now she'd done it.

A growl and a hand emerged simultaneously, the latter lunging for the bunny cop's neck, claws outstretched. But once again the lightning returned, this time unrestrained. 1 second became 5. 5 seconds became 15. 15 became half a minute, yet still she clutched the remote.

"Wew I'm _sowwy i_f the shocks huwt yow feewings, equawity tends to feew wike opwession to the _pwiveledged._" All the while, Judy held down that button. In fact, not only did she continue to hold it, she was actually pressing it even _harder_ now than she was earlier. Had she been a human, her knuckles would've been so white as to make Count Dracula look like a suntanned beach bum by comparison.

"You pweds had your fun. _Centuwies_ of fun. But now you have to play by the same rules as everybody else."

Finally, she let go and leaned in to whisper, grinning _with her teeth_ (an action punishable by law as savage behavior for someone like Nick) as she did so, smug in the knowledge that she was untouchable. "_Deal with it._"

Then, having extracted some amusement from an otherwise fruitless interrogation, she turned to leave, leaving the fox with a broken look on his face and a thousand yard stare, as if he were in a trance.

"From the blue it shall come, and into it you will vanish."

She stopped in her tracks, trying way too hard to seem above it all. "Oh look, empty threats. Run out of ideas already, have we? You really _are_ as stupid as you look. And for your information, it's "_out_ of the blue", not "_from_ the blue". You can't just go around scrambling your idioms all willy nilly."

His trance broke in an instant, and the fox glared at her with such force as to make her physically recoil. Perhaps he'd been high on the air, his head in the clouds, but not anymore. Now he was here, his mind dangerously present in the room as he stared, speaking with a morose, unshakable _finality_ befitting of a man on his deathbed.

"Your time is running out, for he will never let you rest."

"Your fairytales don't scare me." She said, a dismissive tone staining her voice as she reached for the steel lever on the door. Sometimes it was fun to mess with them, but this nutjob had gotten very boring, very fast, and Nicholas Wilde was but the latest sprinkle atop an already bad day.

* * *

Fox came to lying down, surrounded by bright lights. His _everything_ was sore, and his shoulder was being tugged at as if the spider whose green, plasticky web he was ensnared in were clawing at it ceaselessly. The otherwise sterile light in Site 19's medical wing refracted through tubes that fed a pair of IV lines in Fox's arms, setting crimson so deep it was almost black aflame in a brilliant Scarlet. Fox tried to speak, but he could barely bring himself to wheeze. His arms were tied down, as were his legs. Something _c__lanked_ in a metal pan to his side, but what it was he could not see.

"Lucky you" said the doctor, glancing at the somewhat depleted bags that fed the IV lines.

And then it hit him: Waves of tingling cascaded through his flesh, ravenously consuming all the blood they could pump, while a dull pain and a sharp _burrowing_ feeling that was as uncomfortable as it was distinct impacted him all at once. A pair of forceps rose into his view, setting his torso alight in pain as a slimy round thing was quickly dropped onto a pan with a _clank_.

It was a bullet, courtesy of SCP-5562-C.

"Your subclavian artery was punctured. 'Nother minute and you would've bled out on us."

On that note, a nurse came in, flesh bloodbags on her cart, while another doctor reached for Fox's face with a greenish plastic mask in his latex hand. Already Fox felt as if he were sinking, looking not through his eyes, but through periscopes that grew longer by the second. Moments before his cognition ground to a halt, Fox McCloud realized that he had almost died, and that his condition might still be critical.

He did not even have time to try to say "OH SHIT!" before he was out again, leaving the doctors to do their work.

* * *

A small caravan of military vehicles pulled over and came to a rather abrupt stop.

The general, a boar who conducted himself as if he'd been mutilated at birth and had been in a rage ever since, emerged from a jeep with narrow rectangular slits for headlights that was so overtly masculine that it now well within the realm of _compensating_, and angrily stomped through camp with his personal guard in tow. His bleeding crotch and eye sockets were concealed by a comically huge jockstrap beneath his uniform and a pair of mirrorshades that were every bit as soulless as the mask worn by the alien pilot who'd come here through a hole in reality itself. The entire crash site was quarantined now, surrounded by more than enough tents, troops, and armed guards to give Site 19 a run for its money.

"Gut evening, general. _Herr Doktor Scharlachrote _vill be here soon." This version of Security Officer Gerald Calhoon, who had been stationed at a plastic folding table on the side of what was quickly becoming a dirt road through camp, was wearing a bright red eye patch with a black diagonal swastika in the middle, because there's no point to injecting some surrealism into the narrative if you're _not_ going to crank the imagery up to 11. Besides, what self-respecting edgelorde narrator _wouldn't_ take the opportunity to make the sheer _Evil_ that oozed from, seethed within, or otherwise controlled every last centimeter of the place that much more obvious?

Not me. That's for sure.

"Sehr gut. Hat einen Sohn."

And right on cue, _herr doktor_ had arrived. He was one of those self-loathing predator types, strutting about in his prominently displayed T.A.M.E. collar with a pair of his own guards in tow to pump him full of lead of he so much as breathed wrong. He, like the guards and the general, was bleeding from his bloodshot eyes, pried open in an unblinking stare by Rage.

While he placed a briefcase on Officer Gerald's table, one of the guards held forward a heavily damaged shiny metal thing: It was a plasma rifle, and it had once been identical to the one Fox McCloud had brought over, several hours ago.

The doctor gestured to what lay within the case, speaking with an ironically British accent that was thoroughly misplaced amidst the not-so-wacky Nazis that surrounded him now.

"As you can see by the numerous cameras recovered, they were scouts of some army, sent to gather data. This is further evidenced by the firearm we discovered in the wreckage, and the remnants of a tripod lead us to believe that they had orders to find, capture, and defend a point of strategic importance."

"So ve have an _einmarsch_ on our hands?"

"I'm afraid I must concur. An invasion is imminent."

* * *

**Author's note:**

**If you are at all familiar with some of my other stories, then you will know that I have a certain..._affinity_...for literary surrealism. Sorry, not sorry, it only gets worse from here...****Just kidding! Although there _will_ be one or two more trippy scenes towards the end, I am seriously intending this to be a more down-to-Earth story than my other ones (at least to the extent that a _Zootopia/StarFox _crossover which utilizes the SCP mythos as a plot device _can_ be down-to-Earth, anyway).**

**Also, I've made a number of minor edits to some of the other chapters.**

**Thanks for reading! See you in chapter 9.**


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